I’m on hosted discourse, and Discourse Staff sent me here upon my describing the use-case for this (below).
From Discourse Staff
That’s a really interesting idea and I’m surprised that it hasn’t show up on meta.discourse.org (that I can find anyway). That being said, I don’t imagine this would ever make it into the core functionality of the app, but maybe somebody would be willing to make a plugin for it. If it’s something you are super interested in I would suggest creating a topic on meta for this and see what the community has to say.
##My Use Case##
I have quite a large number of long-running (like months-long) topics, which users will occasionally want to check in on the latest happenings, without necessarily filling in all the gaps of what they may have missed since the last time they checked in, if that makes sense.
By analogy, if they were watching a TV show and saw episodes 1-6, but had to miss 7 and 8, they would prefer to just jump back in on episode 9 rather than try to catch up on all that they missed.
So…it would be great for them if I could set topics to display in reverse chronological order rather than the current sort order. In other words, the most recent post would be at the top for a given topic.
I know there are shortcut keys to take them to the latest, but it still takes time to load and scroll, and just seems like unnecessary friction in the user experience for this use case. Especially for the mobile user, the shortcut keys or figuring out to touch “last reply” and manually reverse scrolling from there seems awkward.
I’m fine with ALL topics being sorted this way–I don’t need to have it configurable by category, topic, or user and would prefer it to be a global (teachable) behavior.
##Prior Art##
This idea has been brought up a couple of different times on meta, but not really for the reasons I describe, so I’m hopeful this resonates.
##Level of Difficulty?##
Not sure the best way to get this done even as a plugin…as long as it were reasonably easy, I would be willing to give it a go or fund an expert to give it a go.
If it’s actually hard, it would be helpful to know that.
Appreciate the collective wisdom here in advance.
Thanks!