Log in as Admin. Create a Course. Enrol a Student in the Course. Create a Forum activity in the Course. Go to the Forum. Create several Discussions. Create several replies for some of the Discussions. General sorting Go back to the Forum make sure that the discussions are sorted by default by last post created date in descending order. Try to sort the discussions by ' replies ', ' last post ' and ' created ' by clicking on links in the column header. make sure discussions are properly sorted in ascending and descending order for each sorting method. ** Sorting pinned discussions Go back to the Forum. Pin one or more Discussions. Go back to forum. Try to sort the discussions by ' replies ', ' last post ' and ' created ' by clicking on links in the column header. make sure the pinned discussions are always displayed on top, then the starred ones, and then the rest of the discussions and make sure the sorting works properly each sorting method. Sorting timed discussions Go to one of the Discussions. Edit the Discussion's first post. Set the display period: start date = past date end date = future date Go back to forum. Try to sort the discussions by ' last post ' by clicking on links in the column header. make sure all discussions are sorted by their last post date in ascending and descending. Go to the Discussion. Edit the Discussion's first post. Set the display period: start date = future date end date = future date Try to sort the discussions by ' last post ' by clicking on links in the column header. make sure the discussions which have a 'Display period' where the start date > last post date are sorted properly in asc and desc order by their 'Display period' start date and not the last post date (The start date of the Discussion in this case should be prioritised before the last post date). Testing the webservice Enable web services (Site administration > Advanced features). Create a token for a user which is enrolled in the forum's course (Site administration > Plugins > Web services > Manage tokens) Call the mod_forum_get_forum_discussions web service (MOODLEINSTANCE/webservice/rest/server.php?wsfunction=mod_forum_get_forum_discussions&wstoken=XXXX&forumid=XX&sortorder=XX) through a HTTP client for testing web services (ex. Postman) where: wstoken => the token created for the user;  forumid => the forum's instance id; sortorder => the preferred sort order; Test the sorting order by passing a different value for the sortorder parameter ( 1 => sort by last post created date in descending order   2 => sort by last post created date in ascending order   3 => sort by created date in descending order   4 => sort by created date in ascending order   5 => sort by number of replies in descending order   6 => sort by number of replies in ascending order ) make sure the returned data is sorted   properly (also respecting pinned discussions and starred discussions)