Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions
The elephant in the room seems to be that "most recently active" ordering of topics is still not enough to find what new posts have been added recently.
In a topic with above 1000 posts, where users can add new comments at any point, the only way to find the new posts would be to scroll through the whole thing looking for changes. I've seen proposals to highlight posts added since the last visit, or to collapse some of the oldest posts; but those approaches were tried at Liquid Threads, and they were terrible.
The way I would approach the problem of finding recent posts is by mimicking the current behavior of diffs and Watchlist's "X changes since last visit":
- Each topic header should allow to enable a filter to "show N most recent posts", with N being editable by the user.
- Within the topic, detect the group of the N posts with the most recent time stamp. For each post P in that group:
- Show the base level, 0-nested post from which P hangs.
- Show the post P' from which P is a direct answer.
- Show P, highlighted to showcase that it belongs to the group of N recent posts.
This filter should be allowed at the board level too, to allow users to find the most recent posts in the whole page. If this was done, reordering topics would not be really needed - the most recently active topics would be the only ones left after applying this global filter.