I know that the issue has been discussed before and some progress has been made (and that many disagree that alphabetic sorting on topic title is useful), but to me it is. I am experimenting with Discourse to see if I can use it to replace NeuroDSS.com which contains neurosurgical classification and grading systems. The option that users can add their own classifications (and more) and discuss them on site is a great side benefit. Primarily however, I want users to go to categories easily and find the content they are looking for.
I managed to get the categories view first when accessing NeuroMind.cc, and modified @samās Minimal Topic List Design to allow the user to sort topics in alphabetical order by changing this piece in the header :
I think if you āneedā to sort by title there is something wrong with your approach. As in, you should be using categories or tags for that information rather than embedding it in the title as a string.
That depends, I guessā¦ If someone wants to ābrowseā through a certain category it may be helpful if the content is sorted. Otherwise a topic may be at a different position everytime.
I realize this is not the main purpose of Discourse, but to me the lack of it is currently holding me back of proceeding. Fortunately you also offer categories as JSON in which I can do sorting to create some mobile version myself, but I prefer not to.
We have a category explaining terms; a dictionary. Here alphabetic sorting would be handy to quickly scroll to the right term.
Why is endless scrolling a problemā¦? Couldnāt you just start with āAā and load āBā as the user scrolls down?
Or is the problem that the list canāt be made because to the browser not all topics are known yet, before the user scroll down?
It looks like this idea isnāt going to happen but just to share my use case - we have voting enabled for topics & want to enable users to vote for the stocks that theyād like us to add to our service so that they can invest in them (weāre a stockbroker).
The names of each topic within the dedicated category is the name of the stock.
Unless Iām missing something, it seems like the most useful way to order the list, within the category view, would be in alphabetical order, to make finding stocks that others have already requested easier.
I donāt think Tags would be right for this, as weād only use each Tag once - one Tag for each of the stocks. And as we all know, a large proportion of users donāt use search.
My use case: One of the categories in my Discourse is a User Guide for a website. In the User Guide category I have Topics like āAboutā, āGetting Startedā, āSearchingā, etc. These Topics should be ordered in a specific way, rather than by last update or some other metric. If I could sort the Topics alphabetically, I could rename them to ā1. Aboutā, ā2. Getting Startedā, etc.
Can we please have this already? There have been a lot of requests with various usages explained that affect people. I understand the whole philosophy of encouraging good practices, but this has had at least 4 topics Iām aware of and plenty of replies requesting it ā¦ arguing that weāre doing it wrong is kind of telling us weāre all stupid at this point
At least please allow it with query strings in the url (?sort=title) so you donāt waste time on GUI extras, but please donāt oppose it to the point of almost preventing it.
I donāt need it by default. I just want to be able to do it.
In my case, we add integers to post titles as a ārankā, which we change over time as we review the topicās importance and add new topics. Integers are not necessarily consecutive and their value matters too. Itās a private forum where each topic is a piece of (important) info, from which we need to pick the best N as a last step. The rank reviewing process requires seeing all of them in in one page, and also seeing the integer, then resort, review again, and so on, as we keep working and adding topics with various ranks in-between existing ranks.
We canāt use tags or other ugly categorization, because that would remove a subset of titles from view. Search doesnāt help either.
Currently we copy paste the titles into excel and do the whole thing there, then come back and re-edit, etc ā¦ which is stupid. Discourse should have sorting by title. Itās pretty basic.
So we needed another topic about this? If you feel so strongly about it, offer a bounty in #marketplace, or sign up for an enterprise hosting plan at discourse.org
