I noticed that now users can manually configure to force their settings to reply below or above the previous message but I would like to know if this can be set from the global configuration main.inc.php or force all users to top post?
The default behavior can be set in the main.inc.php file, and you can also then add those defaults to the donot_override array to prevent users from changing it. So the answer to both is yes.
Yup - found it and thank you so much. Resolved!