Default sort order of Latest Message Activity list has changed

[FreelanceReinh]

Dear community managers,

Since Dec 12 I have noticed several new posts which were not displayed at the top of the Latest Message Activity list (as they normally would). At first glance, if you skim through the list, it looks as usual, sorted by descending date/time in column "Last update." But in fact there are a few notable exceptions where more recently updated threads occur further down than they should, i.e., column "Last update" is not properly sorted.

As a workaround I can click twice on the column header to ensure correct sorting, but I would have to do that after every refresh of the page and this was not necessary until very recently.

Interestingly, the same issue started occurring also this week in an unrelated German internet forum that is also powered by Khoros.

[ChrisHemedinger]

Wow @FreelanceReinh -- very astute! And good observation that you saw this change happen on another Khoros forum.

I have not yet looked into the cause, but we did get an update to the community software (as Khoros does roll out an update about every 2 months) that took effect Dec 10. I suspect that other forum had a similar update schedule.

The page in question is a custom page that we built (used heavily by frequent visitors like you), but we populate this by pulling the most recent messages in "descending timestamp order". I suspect (again, have not confirmed) that this order is not coming back correctly with the latest change. We'll look into it and open a case if needed.

Out of curiosity, can you share the name/link of the other forum that you visit?

[FreelanceReinh]

Hi Chris,

Thank you very much for your super fast response on a weekend. I've sent you the link to the other forum via PM. The community managers there are also investigating the issue.

[ChrisHemedinger]

Thanks @FreelanceReinh ! I can confirm that the other community is on the same version as we are...which would have been a recent update.

[FreelanceReinh]

The community manager of the German forum has just posted that their service provider has found the bug and will fix it soon.

[ChrisHemedinger]

Ha! Same here. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

[ChrisHemedinger · Accepted solution]

This should be better now. Khoros applied a fix, but it didn't seem to completely fix our custom "all topics" page. So I applied a change to ensure that the initial sort order is descending by "last update" time for each topic. (Basically like clicking the header for you.)  So that works for the topics you see on a single page. If you keep going back to previous topics ("Next 100" and so on), you might see one pop in that is out of order.

[FreelanceReinh]

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@FreelanceReinh wrote:

As a workaround I can click twice on the column header to ensure correct sorting, but I would have to do that after every refresh of the page and this was not necessary until very recently.

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Also, the scope of this workaround is limited to the current page (100 items), which means that newly updated threads on other pages still remain in the background.

[ChrisHemedinger]

If you want a bigger batch of topics in the list, add a "?topics=300" URL param:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/custom/page/page-id/activity-hub-tbl?topics=300

You'll still get 100 displayed at a time, but a page selector is at the bottom to navigate to the next 100, etc.  Sorting will include all 300.