[OC2PS]

Ticket https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2031

One feature that I struggle a bit in why bbPress broke from the norm is Freshness. It is customary to have the last column for “Last post” which includes the date-time of last post (topic/reply) and the author of last post.

bbPress has decided to use “Freshness” instead of “Last post” as title. Instead of date-time, it displays time-since.

Perhaps time to move to the more convention approach here. Probably good for performance too – won’t need to calculate freshness.

[Stephen Edgar]

As per your post ~2 years ago https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/last-post-date-time-instead-of-freshness/ and the Trac ticket you created:

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2031

Valid, though easily handled in a theme; there are functions to support this if you want this on your own site.
Closing as wontfix. If it turns into a popular request, we can reopen and revisit this then.

[OC2PS]

I don’t understand the reasoning behind showing Freshness instead of Last post in list of topics. bbPress is making an additional calculation, bending over backwards, just to calculate how many seconds, minutes or days have passed since last post.

In this sense, bbPress is breaking from convention that most forum users are familiar with without making performance gains (in fact making performance losses)

I don’t see the reason and I don’t like it this way. But since it is like this then I must assume that there are other bbPress users who do. Hence…perhaps this should be configurable.

[Stephen Edgar]

I’m not sure what the original motivation was for this decision but it has been this way now for over 7 years.

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/branches/0.7

[OC2PS]

Perhaps @johnjamesjacoby or @jaredatch have a perspective on this that I have not yet considered.