Comment feeds in descending chronology

May 7, 2008 11:51 PM

The RSS feeds for comments update in reverse order - with the most recent comments showing up at the bottom of the list (oldest to newest) - unlike the feed for posts where the most recent is at the top (newest to oldest). Why is this the case?

When I subscribe to a thread on AskMe/Meta I'm doing so because I obviously want to follow the discussion. Personally, I don't want to scroll to the bottom of a page (I prefer to view all items to keep a little context), or FF's Live Bookmarks, to find the most recent item.
Can it be addressed by MeFi or is this a 'feature not a bug' thing in the RSS spec?

posted by neetij to Feature Requests at 11:51 PM (4 comments total)

If you bring up the feed for any MeFi thread in your browser, you can see that they're in the exact order that you find them on the site (older comments at the top, newer comments toward the bottom). However, feed readers don't display feed items in chronological order. So I guess that's a feature of your feed reader. I don't know of any feed readers that let you sort items from oldest to newest.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:58 PM on May 7, 2008

I take that back. Google Reader does let you sort feed items in chronological order. Click the Feed settings button and choose "sort by oldest" from the menu. Not sure what you're using to read the feeds, but you might look for something similar.
posted by pb (staff) at 12:05 AM on May 8, 2008

Thanks pb. It is a fix, though it doesn't work everywhere, as you mentioned.
I was trying out Live Bookmarks for a quick and dirty way to track threads...but I guess I'll stick to Reader. "Sort by oldest" seems to work counter to what it professes to do...the newest comments are sorted at the top. *shrug*
posted by neetij at 12:23 AM on May 8, 2008

There's no standard for comment feeds (it's not even mentioned in any spec), so I'm pretty sure we just follow what Wordpress does with feeds for comments.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:02 AM on May 8, 2008