Jharkhandi
Registered Users (C)
Looks so good. Please allow users an option to change their vote - you will see a 90% on oldest first.
Originally posted by JoeF
In English, the standard reading direction is from top to bottom.
So to be able to understand the thread, it should go from oldest to newest.
A short example (pulled from the Jargon file at http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html) illustrates it nicely:
A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?
Here is a much larger example:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb/documents/quotingguide.html
Bad:
"Hi Erik,
Hotel 'xxx' is a good one, I have been there myself. Car rental-company 'yyy'
is around the corner, couldn't be more perfect.
Cya, Peter.
Erik wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am looking for a decent hotel in Paris, not to expensive, preferably
near
> the center and easy reachable with public transport. I am also looking for
a
> car-rental company in Paris.
>
> Cya, Erik"
Good:
"Erik wrote:
>
> I am looking for a decent hotel in Paris, not to expensive, preferably
> near the center and easy reachable with public transport.
Hotel 'xxx' is really good, I have been there myself.
> I am also looking for a car-rental company in Paris.
Rentalcompany 'yyy' is around the corner. That's also very practical.
Cya, Peter."
Originally posted by Jharkhandi
Looks so good. Please allow users an option to change their vote - you will see a 90% on oldest first.
Originally posted by curryus
This is a good example, however, in our context the latest one will work the best because once your start reading a particular thread you dont ALWAYS read all the messages from tbe beginning to get to the latest message. The way I look at the thread is "click" and simply go to the last page to access the message. And if I dont understand the message I go back page by page to understand the context (in case where thread is over few pages long).
So, I would say if we have the latest one on the top it will save time for everyone.
Cheers!
Currys
Originally posted by Pineapple
As in any discussion boards, there is always a tendency for posts to deviate from the original topic. This is especially true in case of long threads.
One just has to look at the last post in any thread. Simply looking at the last post, its very difficult, if not impossible to make out the topic on hand.
Keeping latest thread at the bottom forces participants to look at the original post and hence helps in stemming the deviation.
Once we start putting latest threads on top, I can confidently predict that the discussion in Any thread will deviate so quickly that any coherence and thus usefulness will be lost.
The minor benifits in keeping latest posts on top do not outweigh the costs.