I’m trying to clarify for myself the situation regarding “freshness” and I have several questions about that. There’s been a lot of discussion about this and there are a number of tickets, but I’m having trouble putting it all together. I apologize for rehashing old ground.

(1) Freshness vs Last Post

Sometime in the last few releases things changed so that (at least by default) the top level forum shows “Last Post” where it used to show “Freshness.” Is this (1) A temporary measure until freshness is fixed, (2) A change in philosophy, or (3) Simply a change in the “default” of something that can be configured?

(2) Freshness tickets

When I search on trac for open tickets which mention freshness, I come up with: 1925, 2659, 2876, 3310, 3356. I’ve seen it mentioned in the forums a number of times that freshness is a known problem, but I don’t see that any of these tickets is (I’m not sure how to say it but) the “main ticket” for the underlying problem. Can anyone help me out with this?

(3) bbp style pack

In many of the conversations about freshness (and other problems like threading and indentation) bbp style pack is the only thing mentioned as a solution. I’m almost getting the impression that this plugin is considered kind of a necessary part of bbPress, in order for things to work properly. Comments?

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I’m still learning about bbPress and if anyone wants to point me to any “background” information or documentation that I *should* have already looked at, that would be appreciated.

[@robin-w Moderator 4 years, 6 months ago]

answers from my perspective – I’m just a bbpress user who helps out here, and has written some plugins including style pack

1. it was bbpress authors’ choice to change freshness to last post – it does the same thing, and you can change what it says to what you want either using code or style pack. I don’t think there is any change in philosophy, apart from that what most other forums call that column.

2. I logged 3297 which is incorporated in 3356, which is as far as I know the fix. It is awaiting bbpress authors to look at it.

3. Given that bbpress authors have lots to look at, and that the freshness problem was not in 2.5.x code, I simply added a re-run of the 2.5.x code into my plugin and made it an option, which seems to fix the issue for many people. Given I am designer, author, tester, and everything else for my style pack plugin, I can simply do this. I do not have the problem that my code will affect 300,000 sites, or is run by several people who have busy lives and need to agree who will do what.

[@mike80222 Participant 4 years, 6 months ago]

Robin, thank you. 2 and 3 make sense and I appreciate knowing that 3356 is the one to watch. (I do understand that there is a lot of work to do and I am by no means complaining. Only trying to understand the situation.)

About 1: So if I understand you correctly, this is just a “text change” and the intent is to display the last activity of any sort (freshness?) at the main forum level when the bug is fixed. Is that correct? I’ve seen some discussion about “last post” vs “last reply” and I think what I’m calling “freshness” might also be called “last reply.” So I guess I was worried that I may not quite understand the terminology, or how it’s “supposed to work.”

[@robin-w Moderator 4 years, 6 months ago]

just a name change – last activity is either a topic or reply

so if a user posts a topic, that is the last post until someone either posts a newer topic or someone replies to any existing topic.