Suggestion: sort comments by date

mikekaganski · August 4, 2021, 8:11pm

I suppose that comments are better presented in chronological order. This is unlike solutions to questions, which are best sorted by relevance (solved state + number of upvotes).

As @guilhem suggested in Auto-closing solved questions - #4 by guilhem, let’s discuss it individually

erAck · August 4, 2021, 8:18pm

Absolutely. Comments often evolve as kind of threads, sorting them by some hidden relevance most times doesn’t make sense. (unless a comment should had been a real answer or users can individually switch order).

anon73440385 · August 4, 2021, 8:23pm

Full ACK to sort in chronological order.

EarnestAl · August 4, 2021, 8:39pm

Chronological order.
When more than two people are involved in a comment thread they can get out of question/reply order but with multiple comments there is often no actual solution.
Everybody is used to chronological order on previous site and on social media.

guilhem · August 4, 2021, 10:54pm

Pretty sure there is a bug here. The upstream fix for the issue we stumbled upon last autumn appears to be incomplete: My ruby-fu is pretty-much non-existent, but AFAICT Discourse has a threaded view internally (where quoted posts are treated as replies, for instance) while the upstream code ignores nested comments:

github.com

paviliondev/discourse-question-answer/blob/master/extensions/topic_extension.rb#L122

    
      
              return false
            end
          
          
  has_qa_tag = !(tags & SiteSetting.qa_tags.split('|')).empty?
            is_qa_category = topic.category.present? && topic.category.qa_enabled
            is_qa_subtype = topic.subtype == 'question'
          
          
  has_qa_tag || is_qa_category || is_qa_subtype
          end
          
          
def qa_update_vote_order(topic_id)
            return unless SiteSetting.qa_enabled
          
          
  posts = Post.where(topic_id: topic_id)
            op = posts.find_by(post_number: 1)
          
          
  op.update(sort_order: 1)
          
          
  count = 2
          
          
  # OP comments

That’s why the direct replies (either to the question itself, or to an answer) are properly ordered by creation time, while quoted replies etc. appear to be out of order.

I’ll see what I can do.

guilhem · August 5, 2021, 12:49am

Monkey-patched a fix and reordered all topics last updated August 1 (imported topics don’t have nested comments). Let’s see if that sticks.