[Cironir]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Any forum built around customer support (you know, the ones that do trouble tickets) tend to be ordered this way.

Not the customer support forums of companies I've worked for. Admittedly, though, the "newest first" order was more common a few (many?) years ago, I don't encounter it often anymore. I also agree that there are some advantages to it, but they are far less significant, or even non-existent, on community-focused Boards (where threads are usually on-going discussions rather than question/answer small-scale exchanges).

A number of forum packages support the "automatically go to newest message in a thread since your Last visit" (or "... Last time since you opened this thread") feature, which would probably meet the needs of customer support reps who are pressed for time, and still allow a more "natural" order of Messages in a thread. The current system is as tedious as top posting in Usenet, though not entirely comparable since threads are still ordered "properly".

Anyway, I feel a bit bad that my very first post here was criticism. The different order was the first problem I ran into, so I used the search command and found this thread. It's meant as feedback, not as *****ing.