I am doing some searching in my forums, wanting to read all the posts in a particular forum by one user. So, I go to advanced search, choose a forum to search with the dropdown, and then write a person's name in the author field.
I have observed two kinds of behavior from the results, either:
- The results are returned purely in reverse chronological order, or
- The results are sorted by discussion, and then in reverse chronological order in those groupings of posts
I could see the logic for either behavior, I suppose. However, it is most perplexing to see BOTH occur. Of course, I thought that perhaps I was just being fooled into thinking that #1 was happening, when really I was just looking at a user that never posted in the same forum twice, or the discussion names were misleading me. However, to the extent that I can understand, I verified that the results for the #1 scenario indeed were for a person who had jumped around in the same discussions (looking at the ID numbers for user, forum, discussion, etc.).
For what it's worth, I tried reading the PHP that conjures the search results, and I think the SQL query ends in ORDER BY p.modified DESC - which makes me think it should #1.
Anyway - does anyone have an idea of what the behavior SHOULD be? I feel like I am getting pretty confused over here! Thanks.