Different orders in the tags page

wonderbeel

Hi, I finally understood a problem that some users where reporting to me in the last weeks

If I open the all discussions page or a specific tag we can reorder the discussions for latest/top/newest/oldest
On the other hand, the tags page seems to only use the newest order, so from a quick glance it seems that this page isn't as updated as the other ones (instead it is just a matter of different ordering)

Is it possibile to change this order in some way or it is hardcoded in the flarum core? I tried to look around a little in the admin panel but I haven't see a way to customize it (maybe I am just unlucky and missed it ^_^).

askvortsov

wonderbeel On the other hand, the tags page seems to only use the newest order

Are you talking about the "last posted discussion" item? That's hard-coded to be the last discusssion, so that we don't need to recalculate it every time.

If you're taking about the order of the tag cards themselves, that should correspond to the order in which they're set in the admin dashboard.

wonderbeel

Exactly I was speaking about the "last posted discussion" item, so it is mainly because of performance reasons? It seems to confuse a lot traditional forum users because they are familiar with the idea of "let's quickly look at the sections page to see if there is something new", could it be made customizable directly in core (I saw for example that your categories addon show the the last updated discussion so it should be possible to use other orders also in this page right?) or it is a feature considered out of scope for core and would be better to solve it with an extension instead?

askvortsov

wonderbeel It seems to confuse a lot traditional forum users because they are familiar with the idea of "let's quickly look at the sections page to see if there is something new"

Isn't this exactly what the last posted discussion does? Say which discussion had the most recent activity in each tag?

askvortsov

wonderbeel I saw for example that your categories addon show the the last updated discussion

I'll also note that categories uses the exact same data as tags (except for comment count calculations), so the "last updated" discussion shown by categories is the same discussion as the "last posted" discussion shown by tags.

wonderbeel

Yes you are right, but sadly it seems that some people finds the all discussion page too confusing and prefer the tags page because of the look and feel that is more similar to the homepage of other forum platforms (in fact I needed some weeks to understand this "problem", it is more a matter of mindset it seems).

wonderbeel

Oh damn you are right, next time better to use different titles for the discussions in the test forum.
So changing this order would need modifications of the flarum core or it is already feasible theorically with an extension? I really need to dig a little in the codebase one of these days...

askvortsov

wonderbeel What would you like to show instead? I think that's the part that's confusing me the most here.

wonderbeel

Sorry, I will try to explain it again, the "problem" is just the "last posted discussion" item, some users were asking me if it is possible to show there instead of the last posted discussion the last discussion with an update (this way, the /tags page works similarly to a classic forum homepage where you have a list of sections and every section show the last active discussion).
If I have understood correctly your explanation flarum shows the last posted discussion for performance reasons, my question is if it is theorically possible to achieve this change with just an extension or if it need also some changes in core to be feasible (I am not asking for someone else to do the work in my place obviously, I am just trying to better understand the difficulties).

askvortsov

wonderbeel it should be possible to change this with an extension. You'd need to introduce a custom model and api relationship, as well as the code for calculating it. Then, in the frontend, you could replace the last Posted Discussion to point to your new attribute.

IIRC, doesn't last posted discussion represent the discussion where there was a post most recently, not the one created most recently?

wonderbeel

askvortsov IIRC, doesn't last posted discussion represent the discussion where there was a post most recently, not the one created most recently?

No it is showing the discussion that has been created most recently, you can see for example in the tags page the "last posted discussion" of every tag is the top one of the newest sorting order and not the discussion with the most recent post should be the top one of the latest sorting order.