My website is full of Articles.
Below each Article is a place for registered users to add Comments about the Article.
Should User Comments be sorted in ASCENDING or DESCENDING order?!
What seems more intuitive?
What is more user-friendly?
I would lean towards descending order so people can see when the last Comment was added. (Otherwise you could have an Article where the only Comments that appear “above the fold” starting in 1950…) 
What do you think?
Thanks,
Debbie
That’s a no-brainer 
Let the user decide what order they want. It’s fairly straight forward to add a little up/down arrow, or whatever, at the top of the comments that toggles the comments between ascending and descending order.
For me, I prefer to read comments from top to bottom, and I would suspect that a lot of people may feel this way, considering social media site interaction (i.e. Facebook is ascending).
However, should you have a lot of comments it can be tedious to scroll all the way to the last comment to see the latest one. If you can have your comments expand that may be helpful and should be fairly easy to implement.
Whatever you choose, I also suggest having a prominent date that’s clearly in view. Too often do I read comments and realise too late that I might be reading old ones instead of the latest (no matter what order).
I can’t recall the last time I have seen most recent comments first…
I read from top to bottom unsurprisingly; so I the oldest reply posts within a comment system would make sense being at the top for me if I were to read the time-line of conversation.
The article arrangement may however differ with the latest fresher article appearing nearer the top. As was stated above it may make sense to give the viewer the option.
I’d probably show the 5 latest comments in ascending order with the option to show previous comments if desired.
Hmm…
So, how do most online newspapers handle this?
How does Facebook, MySpace, etc handle it?
It seems like more people than not expect the top-most comment to be the first/oldest and as you scroll down, the comments become newer with the bottom-most comment being the newest.
How many comments will there be? Good question! But I hope this new features creates more traffic at my website!!!
Debbie
I’m not sure that is the case, especially if judging by a handful of responses in this thread. If you really want to know peoples’ preferences perhaps run a poll and if you get at least 100 votes then you might be at least approaching a representative sample of users.
But in any case, personally, I prefer to have the latest comment at the top of the list so I can see what the “current thinking” is rather than what someone thought potentially in the distant past which might not be as relevent today.
For example, although forums are a different scenario to your website, I have my preferences set on this forum so that the last post in the thread is at the top and the original post is at the bottom so I can see immediately what the last person said without having to scroll down or go to the last page.
So like I said before, I would let the user select whether they want ascending or descending comments (with a toggle) and not impose an order of comments on them.
The two that I read and comment on most, the Guardian and [url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/]Telegraph do it opposite ways round.
The advantage of having most recent comments at the top is that it’s easier for people to see the latest comments, which may help to stimulate the discussion.
The advantages of having oldest comments at the top are
[list][]it rewards people who post early, because everyone gets to see their post, whereas on newest-first the earliest comments are likely to quickly find themselves languishing on page umpteen and barely looked at
[]it helps discussions to flow by keeping everything in a logical order, and showing the original comments before the responses – when you have the responses come first, it can get very confusing
[]pagination is fixed, if your comment is #10 on page 2 then it will always be #10 on page 2 – with newest first, comments slide down the pages and you never know where it’s going to be
[]related to pagination, it’s easier to read all comments – with newest-first, a lively and active discussion will be evolving as you read it, moving things down the pages while you’re reading them and new comments appearing on pages you’ve already passed.[/list]
I would hope you can tell from that which side of the fence I’m on.
Re Max’s comment about “current thinking” … that does depend to some extent on the timescales you’re looking at. The news sites I’m thinking of tend to lock comments after a few days, so they don’t have a chance to get superseded by newer thinking, whereas blogs that keep the comments open forever might in some cases find that out-of-date comments appear first. On the other hand, keeping the comments in chronological order does make it a lot easier to figure that out when you’re reading down.
You make some EXCELLENT points!!
I think just based on your comments, that I would want to change to Oldest/First/Top and Newest/Last/Bottom.
Debbie
Exactly the point I was making and hence my preference to let users decide for themselves whether they want ascending or descending comments.
There is no 100% correct or 100% incorrect answer to the op’s question. It boils down to what in anyone’s opinion is the “best” answer
Some excellent answers here. Basically every user is different, and I agree that (if you can) you should account for that by allowing the option as Max said.
But you will need to choose a default, should the user not choose one for themselves every time they visit. And I believe the “safest” choice is the one you have chosen and Stevie D sums up why perfectly.
The biggest thing that automatically comes to mind when dealing with comments is on my Facebook. So often (too often) do I come to the party late, and 1) I see the latest comment first, which is often completely out of context) and 2) I have to click to see the earlier comments (which can be annoying when there’s 100+ comments and I have to click multiple times i.e. fan pages). This kind of clicking is what people would have to do (next page, next page) to get the context of some comments.
They wouldn’t necessarily have to choose an order every time. Yes, you will obviously need a default for the very first time a user visits the page, but then you can set a cookie to store the user’s asc/desc preference, if they choose one, for subsequent visits. Another option could, like on this and on many other sites, be to store the user’s preferences in a database table and not use cookies at all.
Only if the cookie doesn’t exist and if you don’t want to store preferences in a database will the user be forced to accept the default order of comments.
Oh sorry that’s what I meant. I worded that wrong.
I meant for each individual unique visitor.
My mistake.