Whille playing with the new .net version, I found myself pondering what the best way to display the active topics.
should I stick to the way it is done with the current code (active topics are order by category/forum/lastpostdate or should they just be displayed by lastpostdate and not ordered by category/forum.
Anybody have any strong opinions either way ?

I think I prefer the categorized version. Not a too relevant issue, but I am a member of a forum where that doesn't happen, and you don't really have a clear notion of where the posts belong to.

I would still keep an indication (and link) to where the post came from, just not group them into category/forum, it makes more sense to me to have the latest topic at the top of the list, with the current system the latest post could be on a totaly different page

I like it the way it is. On my forum, people have certain categories they care about and some they don't. The way it is now it's easy to just skip over the categories you don't like. If I switched it to the other way, I'd better find a foxhole fast.

Maybe I am too used to Snitz, but I now use regularly vBulletin and sometimes I am handling posts I shouldn't be, just because there is not a clear indication to where they belong, as it happens with Snitz. I do agree with Bobby, because of that.

ok, thanks for the input

Hmm ... never really gave it much thought, guess I'm just used to the way we currently do things. On a busy forum, it's definitely advantageous to have them categorised so members can skip over the categories they have no interest in. But, we (as individual developers) want to encourage people to spend as much time as possible on our sites and interacting - they can easily miss a topic that would interest them or that they could contribute to with active topics categorised.
I suppose it's down to personal preference, really - how hard would it be to give each member the option of how they wanted them displayed?

probably not that difficult, I will have a play, the categorization is done by calling a single function which just rewrites the diplay of the grid (the query is preordered by cat/forum/lastpostdate and then just calls a function when binding to the grid), so changing it would just be a matter of using a different orderby clause and not calling the groupby function on the grid.