OK since your first e-mail (which didn't explain quite as clearly what was happening) I've looked at your comments in the ticket you submitted for SloanSpace V2.
It does look like you folks made a minor change to the order by clause in SSV2's sources that didn't get picked up in the OpenACS tree. Jeff may've missed it on a merge or it may well have been added after he did his merge.
I'll wait for other comments but now with this crystal clear explanation I think you're right, that there's no reason to want to be presented them in the current order, it makes the forums notifications ugly.
And if the order by clause isn't covering date already (whether ascending or descending) there's no guarantee of order anyway, add a bunch more data and Oracle may start spitting them out in random order which would never make sense.
