11
votes
What is the purpose of the Activity tab at the top?
The Most Votes/Most Comments/Newest are self explanatory, but what does "activity" mean? I looked at the FAQ and Mechanics blog posts and I didn't see anything explaining it. Is it similar to Reddit's "Hot" view? I'm especially curious because it appears to be the default.
It's pretty much the same as forums traditionally worked: new topics come in at the top, and a new comment in any topic bumps it back to the top. So they're in the order of "most recent posting activity".
Is the default sort time still 3 days or has it changed to all time? I have mine set to all time, so I can't tell. Also, when I search in a group, the search results default to all posts on tildes instead of in that specific group; I'm not sure if you meant it to be that way.
It's 3 days on the front page, all time if you go into an individual group.
And yeah, currently search only works for the full site, there's no group-specific search yet.
Activity is a fairly nebulous term; it doesn't really convey a direct meaning to the user. The word Forum/Board/Thread would work better I feel - everyone instinctively knows how those work.
Pretty sure it just sorts them in descending order of what's been most recently commented on.
It sorts by both recently commented and recently posted, I think. Notably, it is not like Reddit's Hot view in that votes don't count for tildes activity sorting afaik.
To put it simply, it sorts by what posts are active.
=)
What it needs to be really effective is some way to sort the comments by active ignoring parents or at least like highlighting recent comments. Having to scan through the whole tree just to find 1 or 2 new comments is more than a bit of a pain.
That exact thing is in the settings menu. Under configure marking new comments.