[Using Sakai] Request for votes to fix an Announcements issue (SAK-21015)

[Regan, Alan]

Dear Dev and Using Sakai Lists,

I am writing to draw your attention to the following JIRA ticket:
"Announcements - please restore the listing of announcements to show newest to oldest"
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-21015

ISSUE: We are now seeing in Sakai 2.8.1 and Sakai 2.9.0 that the display order for announcements has changed.  In the past, the latest/newest announcements were always posted first.  This is because users want to see the latest news at the top -- for ease of use and keeping tabs on the latest info.  Now, we are seeing that it is listing the oldest announcements first, which we feel is a major, major, major problem.  (We've already received complaints from faculty that expect and rely on the previous behavior.)

I have been able to confirm this problem on both our hosted installation of Sakai 2.8.1 as well as two of the nightly Sakai 2.9 servers.  Screenshots are included in the JIRA.

If you agree that announcements should be listed newest first by default, please vote for the change in JIRA.  I'm hoping it's a simple fix (since it was working fine in earlier releases of 2.8 and Sakai)...

Thank you!

P.S. If there are valid use-cases for listing oldest to newest, then I'd appreciate a setting in Announcements > Options that allows the professor to select the display sort order (newest to oldest, oldest to newest) and perhaps a config flag that allows the institution to set a default value for their needs(?).  This way, we could set the system default to newest to oldest, saving faculty from having to set this each semester.  If there isn't a use-case or reason for the new display behavior, hopefully we can simply return to the previous one. :)  Thanks again!

Sincerely,

Alan Regan, MFA
Manager, Technology and Learning
Information Technology
Pepperdine University
(310) 506-6756