Topics from some categories do not appear on /latest

This is a stretch but have you by any chance changed this setting for that category:

It truly is the last thing I can think about.

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Thanks @Chapoi That is a very good question - but I cannot for the life of me even find that setting under the ‘Appearance’ tab.
A settings search for ‘topic list’ also elicits nothing for me.

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Oh sorry, it is a category setting. So go to the category tab via here:

Choose a category > click wrench

And then to the settings tab:

And scroll down

But if you don’t know it, the chances you’ve changed it are slim :slightly_frowning_face:

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Thanks @Moin

Where would I find/check/edit the ?order=posters parameter?

I found nothing obviously related by searching admin settings

I think just in the URL when you are on the /latest page.

So on meta it is https://meta.discourse.org/latest

and shouldn’t be anything else for example

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I sometimes have something like this sticking at the URL, without any configuration. It can happen, for example, after clicking one of the column headings in the topic list.

FWIW… In attempting to repro this I think I’ve managed to bork my latest list in a similar way, though I’m not 100% sure exactly what I did to do it…

Currently I have a subcategory whose topics simply don’t show in Latest no matter what category level or topic level notification I set for them. This also spans multiple test users as well.

No consistent repro as yet, nor a solution to remedy it, but maybe this could help focus some thoughts on a potential bug?


The only ‘fix’ I’ve come up with so far is to create a new subcategory and slide the topics into that. They then show up in my topic lists as normal.

From what I can tell, the ‘problem’ category still seems to thinks it’s muted for some reason. :person_shrugging:

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Thanks @chapoi .

Found it, and my setting for the Architects Forum subcategory was on ‘Descending’

Not sure if that was significant, but I switched it to ‘default’

According to my MS Co-pilot query on the subject, the ‘100% definitve and certian truth’ is that the ‘Latest’ filter essentially just means ‘most recently touched’

Apparently, many things can ‘touch’ a post and shift it to the top even without those things changing any visible date - including the forum software rebuilding process itself (which I recently did, with extensive fiddling to get Let’s Encrypt working again).

Things like changes to user notification settings, administrator actions to shift old wrongly categorised posts into the correct category etc (which I had also done a bit of), can also push old posts to the top of the ‘latest’ filter listings even though the date remains old.

A better, smarter default filter than ‘Latest’ seems to be ‘Hot’.
If this true, it is not clear to me why including the ‘Latest’ filter in the Top menu setting has been made mandetory at all in Discourse Admin All Site Settings=>Basic Setup (not including it triggers a warning)

I have just reordered my Top menu, making ‘Hot’ now the default, and have added extra filter options to the menu such that ‘Latest’ is now at the bottom end of a longer list of options, and so will hopefully be used less often by hapless users.

The result is now almost back to the way things appeared before the Latest filter started delivering these whacky results.

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The fact that the topics show in hot seems to indicate that they are somehow still muted. @JammyDodger just told me the same, and it reminded me of the fact that there is a bug with muted topics appearing in hot:

So maybe using hot is a workaround, but it’s likely to break once that is fixed. I think we should still try to find out why the category mutes the topics even when it’s not muted.

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Fair enough @Moin

Just marked the topic as ‘not solved’ again.

I wondered if, at least in my case, what looks like muting, might instead be a product of old posts in my unwanted subcategory being ‘touched’ by background processes (or me recently going back and fixing old category errors to old posts) , and thus pushed to the front for the ‘Latest’ filter?

That said,stuff is now getting weirder for me - now that I have made those tweaks to Top menu, clicking on the ‘Latest’ filter seems to generate what I actually expect & want to see under that filter, with topics now back in a coherent date order - at least while the correct subcategory is selected.

Perhaps there is a bug impacting some hidden variable somewhere, and the process of toggling menus around is needed to partially un-bork things?

What is still borked is that, with no category selected, I am still getting exclusivily older posts in the unwanted category appearing by default when the filter is ‘Latest’

Scrolling to the end reveals no posts in the wanted category at all - which is positivly misleading for users, many of whom will probably lose interest in the forum there and then, due to apparent lack of activity!.

The issue goes away when the filter is ‘Hot’ - posts from all categories appear in order of recentness, as they should, when no category is selected.

What might help is a way to tell Discourse whether items merely ‘touched’ should be toggled to display according to the last visible posting date, rather than the last background activity date, when filtered by ‘Latest’.

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I’m not getting much further in my investigations, but I think it could be something to do with the indirectly_muted_categories.

Latest should be all topics in descending activity order, minus any muted topics/categories. This is definitely a break from that, and is as yet unexplained.

The ‘activity’ that bumps a topic is generally stuff that people would find relevant/interesting. It has been changed recently to stop edits bumping (apart from in certain circumstances. I’m a bit hazy on the exact specifics of where that currently stands. I think they’re still tweaking it?), but bumps for activity shouldn’t be by anything hidden in the background.

We had a breakthrough: as soon as you remove the category from the “Shared drafts category” site setting, it appears as expected.

@Paul_King, is the category that doesn’t appear in latest for you currently configured as Shared drafts category?

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Slightly sheepish, as I forgot I’d put it in there. :flushed_face: Certainly explains why I couldn’t repro with other categories.

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Bingo! Yes, that seems to work for me too

Well spotted!

I assume this is a bug, and not a feature?

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The description of the setting only mentions topics being hidden for staff users, but it seems to affect all users.

Enable the Shared Drafts feature by designating a category for topic drafts. Topics in this category will be suppressed from topic lists for staff users.

I have no experience with this feature. I don’t know if the effects have always been like this.

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It actually makes sense to me they would be hidden from normal users and the copy is wrong.

Hmm. @martin what do you think?

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