With this week’s Discourse update, you can sort topics by their ‘hotness’, which takes activity into account to help surface currently active conversations.
You can select it from the topic navigation bar:
Keeping up with the content in active communities can be challenging. Outside of reading everything created in your community, how can you be sure that you’re reading what’s resonating most with your members?
Introducing Hot, the newest topic sorting option that helps you discover what’s currently trending in your community based on recent likes and lively discussions. Think of it like the trusty Latest filter, but a bit smarter — Hot helps you discover content that is recent and resonant with your community members.
How does Hot sorting work?
The Hot sort algorithm blends the overall popularity (based on likes, reactions, or comments) of a topic since it was first created and its recent popularity based on how members are interacting with the topic. This means that Hot will surface newer, actively discussed topics alongside older, popular topics. Hot sorting is ideal for members in large, active communities that want to find conversations that are currently trending, which they might want to participate in.
How is it different from Top?
Unlike Hot sorting, which looks at a combination of overall popularity and recent popularity, Top sorting only looks at the overall popularity for the selected time period (e.g., week, month, etc.). Top is most useful when you’ve been away from the community for an extended period of time and want to read up on what happened.
You can find more information about this feature on the Discourse forum.