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It would be fairly easy to reverse the order of the
top level list, but it is not particularly easy with
the way the code is currently written. It would probably
be best to read in the whole list and then reverse it
before printing anything.
But I wonder about the motivation for this. HyperNews
is not particularly good for repeated visits to the
same page just to find the new things. And a reverse
order of all top level items just so the newest top-level
items show up first, and encourages backwards reading,
all seems rather discombobulating (sp?)
Helping people read just the new things was why the
email notification was added a year ago, but it does
require people to adapt to email.
Better than reversing the order would be a couple other
ways to organize the presentation. First, any really
popular page probably needs to be subdivided so that
each page is more managable. For example, there are
now a dozen different pages on HyperNews itself. Well
the next problem is finding the right place to read
and post. There ought to be an automatic list of
related pages on each base article or something like
that.
Another aid would be a date option, similar to what
wired has in their "threads". There is already code
in place to return only responses since some date,
but it may be broken at the moment and there is no
interface to use it. To make this really useful,
users should not have to tell the system what date
to use but rather the system would remember the last
date the user reloaded the page, or something like that.
A single date per user would not be too bad to maintain.
What email provides is a mailbox per person of things
they have not yet read. This is better than remembering
all the things each user has read, which can be much greater.
We could provide the equivalent
of a mail system in HyperNews. We would have to ensure
that mailboxes did not get too large.
We really need a replication system in place soon, so
that each replica manages the info of interest to users
of that replica.
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Other solutions possible too 
Reversing Threads?
(Randy Cosby)
Another alternative....
by jap@tc.cornell.edu, 1996, Jan 02
Solution to annoynace from oldest-first order of responses
by aphor@bradley.edu, 1996, Jun 04
