I see myself creating a lot of topics like this one at Codeacademy: Welcome to our forums! Please Introduce Yourself. In this case, it makes a LOT of sense to see the newest replies first (as opposed to the oldest), because I want my community’s newest members to receive love. Does the ability to decide which reply is shown first by the topic writer (not the user) available?
The best solution that I can think of is to create an Introductions category and encourage people to post a new topic in that category.
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That would be a bit of a “boil the sea” solution as it would create a ton of new topic notifications for people to wade through. Not recommended.
The easy thing to do is include a jump to last post link at the top of the topic in the top of the first post, where people will land.
That looks like this
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@codinghorror Good point on the topic notifications! So would you recommend @pfaffman’s solution of creating an Introductions category instead? This way people won’t be notified of every new member joining (unless they watch the category) but will see the latest introductions first.
I believe Jeff meant that creating an introduction category would “create a ton of new topic notifications.”
i.e. resulting in a large number here:
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I would not recommend that, in fact I’d advise kinda strongly against it.
Instead, link to the topic in this form, with /last at the end, and whoever clicks that link will be jumped to the last post in the topic automatically.
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https://discourse.example.com/t/topic-title/12345/last
I suggest you also edit this link into the first paragraph of the first post, like so:
Welcome!
Jump to the last post to see the latest introductions.
That way new users entering at the top can easily jump to the end, and have a handy obvious link and call to action for doing so.
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@xrav3nz @codinghorror, got it! Thank you for your patience in explaining how topic notifications work. Problem, solved.
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Probably depends on the amount of new, vocal joiners. I have an introduction category and it works fine, so agree with @pfaffman 
It’s only a month old though … so I’ll let you know if it causes any trouble 
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Please, do! Is your discourse public? If so, may I join it to take a look?
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