Allow paid journals/communities to display most recently active entries first
Title
Allow paid journals/communities to display most recently active entries first
Short, concise description of the idea
I'd like paid journals and communities to be able to specify "most recently active" as a method for displaying journal entries on the first page of the journal.
Full description of the idea
Similar to this older suggestions I'd like a way of displaying the most recently active entries in a community or journal. By recently active I mean that the entry with the newest comment is at the top of the list, the second newest comment is second on the list, and so on down the line. However, instead of just placing these in a sidebar of the journal I'd like to see this information used to create a custom ordering to the journal, so that when this option is selected the first page of the community or journal would display entries based on latest-comment time instead of post time. Subsequent pages of the journal (?skip=#) should order entries by post time as is normal (in order to reduce database load). Perhaps when this is selected the entries per page is capped at a lower number than usual.
An ordered list of benefits
- In communities this will draw attention to older entries that may be drawing new comments.
- New readers to a community will be able to find ongoing discussions in older threads.
- This kind of ordering is very common in bulletin boards and forums and will give communities more opportunities to structure as they like, as well as providing another paid community benefit.
- This is probably very database intensive, especially for very active communities, which is why I suggest limiting it to paid journals and communities.
- The switch from "organized by comment time" to "organize by post time" from page 1 to page 2 can be confusing. It's also possible that the switch could cause some entries to be missed if the viewer changes pages after the order has changed.