Why is Chat _Chat?

[UnexpectedItemInShaggingArea]

It's always annoyed me. It looks untidy.

[GeorgianMumto5]

I've always wondered that.

[AhoyMcCoy]

Somethinggggg to do with active convos used to be listed alphabetically and all the "chat" topics clogged it up, so they called it _Chat so they went to the bottom.

I think.

[hashtagwhatever]

I don't get it.

[UnexpectedItemInShaggingArea]

What is a _ called anyway?

[hashtagwhatever]

oh now I see it, well spotted
I hadn't noticed.

[juneybean]

Underscore?

[AhoyMcCoy]

Sorry- I ramble. Because the letter c is high up the aloha bet, chat topics were always at the top of the list, so other threads got overlooked. By calling it _chat, it sent the chat topics to the bottom in active convos so you had to scroll past the other topics to get to chat, which kept the other topics a bit busier as people would be more likely to see them and post.

I THINK.

[AhoyMcCoy]

and "aloha bet" = "alphabet" obvs.

[UnexpectedItemInShaggingArea]

Ah, underscore, of course.

So the _ is now redundant?

Hello Tech can you lop the _ off Chat please? It bothers me. Thank you

[MisselthwaiteManor]

I wondered this too. If you want to advanced search for something specifically in _chat you have to scroll past a billion topics including all the local ones to get to it, which is annoying.

[FruOla]

It's to do with alphabetical sorting, so anything with an underscore goes after the normal A-Z.

Similarly, if you look at the A-Z list of topics you'll see that Forces' Sweethearts is right at the top - above the A's - because it's actually listed as "Forces. Presumably the " makes it superior to A, IYSWIM?

[UnexpectedItemInShaggingArea]

So why does " put something at the top of a list and _ put something at the bottom?

[MackerelOfFact]

That's weird, because at work I often prefix file names with a _ so that they appear at the top.

I always assumed it was an alphabetising thing but it does look untidy.

[FruOla]

I don't know. Perhaps Tech has customised the alphabetical sorting differently?

[RowanMumsnet]

Yup, AhoyMcCoy is right - it was because people tended to see 'Chat' and nothing else, so all sorts of threads were getting put in there.

[HowardTJMoon]

It's to do with how computers sort things. Every character - letters, digits, punctuation - is identified by a different number. For historical reasons (that I could bore you insensible about if required but that is explained here) it ended up that the order of characters was:

some punctuation characters one of which is "
Numerical digits 0-9
a few more punctuation characters
Capital Letters in alphabetical order
even more punctuation one of which is _
lower-case letters in alphabetical order
and a few more bits of punctuation

When a computer does a simple sort it uses this order. Hence why something beginning with double quotes goes first and something starting with an underscore ends up after everything starting with a capital letter.