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It's the top post when I visit the story so it's presumably got more than all the others, including me?

Ah, OK, it's not top for me and there's no indication that stories are sorted by votes score/ most upvotes/ balance of upvotes or whatever it was you thought put him at the top.

I always assumed that it was datetime sorted on first-level comments as there was no indication to suggest any other sort and IIRC my new first-level comments enter at the top.

No, have a skim of the top-level comments on this post or others. It's not simple time-based ordering, popular comments get pushed to the top. Freshness is a factor, else all new comments would be near the bottom with un point, but as all things age it becomes nearly all score. The source for the forum used to be available in the Arc language tar file, perhaps it still is.

It is a combination of time and votes, with time decaying. The goal is that new comments can be seen but top voted comments wind up on top long-term.

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