Comments on A random button for ordering Code Golf post lists
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A random button for ordering Code Golf post lists
On most Codidact communities the posts list has a "Random" button among the sorting buttons:
The only exceptions are the Codidact Proposals community, and Code Golf:
This suggests that it is an optional button that can be switched on and off per community.
I can't find any previous discussion of avoiding having it on Code Golf. I'm wondering whether it was simply never requested for this community, or if there is a reason for avoiding it.
Would you prefer the button to be present or not, and what are your reasons?
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I was surprised by your post, as I don't recall any discussions about changing that, and then I wondered how to change that. I looked around in the site-level and category-level settings both here and on a community that has the "random" button, and I couldn't find anything.
Then I got a "no wait, we didn't, did we...?" feeling and checked the Q&A category here. Yup -- it has a "random" button. The challenges category does not.
I suspect that when we added this, we thought the obvious utility was for "main" categories and we wanted to exclude Meta. But instead of excluding Meta, I wonder if we hard-wired "Q&A". I'm going to have to do some more digging to find out; this paragraph is all guesswork. Found it. Yes, the code special-cases this button to categories named "Q&A".
And now I'm wondering about other categories. Should all categories, including Meta, support a random sort? It seems like it would make sense for some other non-Q&A categories, like Cooking's recipes. My inclination is to remove that line, not instead change it to "anything but Meta".
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