Reversing long running threads so newest posts are visible?

[MrPoling]

I like how threads are normally displayed with the original post first.

However there are a few threads on here that have run into hundreds of pages. Most notably the Photo of the Day thread.

Is it desirable or practical to change the presentation of these threats to show the newest content on the first page?

 

[billconner]

When I open a thread, it immediately goes to the first unread post by me, whether first page or page 27. I find this to work great. I click "new posts", read the ones I want to, and then click "mark forums read". What could be better?

 

[Gamma1214]

When I open a new thread, I click the "watch thread" button on the upper right of the first post (note: commenting will automatically set the "watch thread" function). This results in a red number showing up (by the bell icon) in the upper right corner of the screen if there are new posts on any / all of those threads. Click the bell and a drop down menu shows which threads have comments and, as Bill says, clicking those takes you to the first unread comment.

If it's an older thread and you don't want to read stuff from 2016 or so, you can click the last comment on the "what's new" page by going to the right of the thread announcement and clicking the "4 hours ago" (or whatever) above the last poster's name.

I like the way it works now and, if I missed a thread, I enjoy reading from the first post even on the reopened threads from a decade ago.

 

[recped]

I like how threads are normally displayed with the original post first.

However there are a few threads on here that have run into hundreds of pages. Most notably the Photo of the Day thread.

Is it desirable or practical to change the presentation of these threats to show the newest content on the first page?

I use some forums where that sort option is available but most do not. The auto "go to last read post" works reasonably well but does not seem to work on older threads. The simple way to deal with that is to select the last page and them scroll down to find the most recent posts.

 

[Glenn MacGrady]

I like how threads are normally displayed with the original post first.

However there are a few threads on here that have run into hundreds of pages. Most notably the Photo of the Day thread.

Is it desirable or practical to change the presentation of these threats to show the newest content on the first page?

I'm not aware of any way to display a thread in reverse chronological order either by members or by the administrator. There may be third party add-ons that can do that, but I keep this site clean of all third party add-ons except for some of the color themes.

You can filter threads at the forum level. For example, if you open the Photography and Videos forum and click the filter button, you can sort the threads by last message, first message, replies, views, or a couple of other parameters. However, that's not what you are proposing, which is to sort the messages within threads in reverse chronological order.

In my opinion, since this is a discussion forum, the overwhelming majority of threads are in fact discussions that wouldn't make much sense to read in reverse chronological order. I assume that's also the opinion of the Xenforo development team. You can reach the most recent message in a thread via the methods already discussed above.