Forum OpenACS Q&A: Sorting of messages in forums

I notice the OpenACS forums are sorted "oldest first" rather than
"newest first". I certainly prefer the latter. How do others feel
about this? If it's equally split, can this preference be made into a
user selection on the "edit alert" page?

I think the basic problem is that the ACS defaults to "oldest first", even though Philip's set up his own forums on photo.net to be "newest first".  Worse, when you create the forum, you're not presented with this as one of the configurable options, you have to go to the administration page AFTER you've made the forum then change the presentation order.

Obviously, it's easy to forget to do so.  It may be that Ben prefers oldest first (Ben?) but many prefer newest first, including me.

As far as user configurability, sure, why not?  Add it as a "desired feature" using the SDM...thus far we're trying to maintain line-by-line compatibility with the ACS, and will undoubtably do so for bboard at least through ACS 4.0 because aD is rewriting the bboard  module.  If their rewrite picks up all the features folks want and that are deemed useful by the community, great - if not, post-4.0 would be  a good time to look into adding them.

openacs.org is running on an old beta of OpenACS and since we haven't done upgrade.sql files and many many changes were introduced in ACS 3.1 and 3.2, Ben just hasn't had the time to upgrade our site... and I don't think it will be done until we come up with an upgrade.sql.

I started on this but it is time-consuming since PostgreSQL currently requires lots of create temp tables, copy, drop old table, create new modified table, copy from temp to new table. If there are other tables with ref integ pointing to that table, then you have to do the same to the other tables _before_ even starting on the table you're trying to change. I think I reached the bboard portion of the upgrade.sql and I plan on finishing it.