Sort/order feed page items

[ldexterldesign]

👋

Quick question before I create a feature request (bit surprised not to find this requested in existing issues but I may have missed it 🤷)

Is it possible to sort/order feed page items?

Currently the items seem to be sorted by "number of unread entries" but, personally, I would like them sorted alphanumerically so I can see feed domains grouped together

Aside, perhaps some sane sort/order options can be applied to the other pages too..?:

categories:
- alphanumeric
- total( feeds)
- unread( items)
- read( items)

feeds:
- alphanumeric
- total( feeds)
- unread( items)
- read( items)
- date/time created (i.e. added)
- date/time updated

history:
- date/time read

starred:
- date/time created (i.e. added)

Hope to hear back

Sincerely

[ldexterldesign]

BUMP

[ldexterldesign]

BUMP

[stefs]

This looks great to me!
Hopefully I can soon sort my feeds alphabetically.

[whaler-ragweed]

It would nice to have "group items by feeds."

[shizunge]

I think we need to get the following questions answered before we start working on it. Hopefully we can hear back from the maintainer @fguillot .

1. How does a user select the sorting algorithm?
   1.1. In the setting page? like entires today?
   1.2. Or adding a new "sort" button in the feed list? Click to expand to list all sorting options?
   P.S. I just saw it in my previous unmerged PR Add sort buttons to the feeds page #992, let user select a default order in the setting page and also allow users to change it via a button on the feed page.

2. Do we sort the feeds on the server or on the client/web interface?
   I perfer to sort feeds on the client side/web interface, because sorting on the client side is more responsive to me and it reduces the network & server workload, given that the client already has (or can have) all information it needs for sorting. But I remember I did receive comments that people perfer to sorting on the server.

3. What information do we display on the feeds page.
   3.1. If we sort it by published at, should we add it to the feed list?
   3.2. Do we only display the published at when the feeds are sorted by published at? i.e. Display the criteria only when we choose to sort by it.
   3.3. Do we want to always display published at? Rather than 3.2.
   3.4. Do we still need to display the last check at and next check at? To avoid to much information on the feed page.
   3.5. If last check at and next check at are still wanted, should we add a debug global option to display them only when the option is on?

I found related issues #785 #632 #697

A demo of a prototype from my previous unmerged PR #992. Hopefully it is inspiring. Unfortunately, it is totally out of sync, and I cannot work on it anymore.

[ldexterldesign]

Category sorting seems to exist now (unless I missed it back in 2022 🤷):

This just needs extending for the suggested use cases in my first post, and the others y'all have requested

Sort should happen server-side - no point in doing it client side if the setting/interaction itself is on another page (i.e. /settings). Also pagination.

🤞

[shizunge]

1. Apparently the following is missing from your first post:

• sorted by errors -> Use case: Current view
• sorted by disabled -> Use case: User has disabled feed and want to only manually refresh them. This helps user to find these disabled feed quickly.

Also user should be able to sort either ascendingly or descendingly.

2. My question 3 is still relative. If you sort by published at, however the published at is not visible on the feed list, it is not quite helpful.

3. I disagree that we can only change the sorting in the settings.

It depends on the use case. I wish everyone could answer: Why do you need to sort feeds differently?

If user barely changes the sorting, yes a single setting page would work fine.

Adding a sort button in the feed list is really help for my use case. For my use case, the sorting helps me find a particular feed, I may want to change the sorting on the fly and frequently to find different feeds. Would it work if we can only change sorting in the settings? Yes. But is it easier for me to find a feed? Definitely no. I have to go back and forth between feed list and settings multiple times.

Whether the sorting is done on the server or on the client, it is still arguable. However It is an independent question from the above one. We can do both adding a button on the feed list and sorting on the server. My point is this combination does not provide the best user experience. But it is better than no sorting button.

[shizunge]

Also I hope we can improve the wording:

Sorting 
* Alphabetical
* Unread count

I think it is more clear to me.
Either

Sorting 
* Alphabetically
* By unread count

or

Sorting by
* Name/Title
* Unread count

[ldexterldesign]

Stars, history, feeds - users could have 1000s of items?!

Seems sensible to manipulate this server-side, but I could be wrong 🤷

Also, I like MF interface simple and I sense that's the ethos here

Regards

[shizunge]

I may not express myself clearly. Doing it on server-side or client-side is not the most important question, though it is arguable.

The most important question to me is how easy it is for me to find a particular feed based on a given criteria. And I hope these criteria are showing on the feed list.

I have tried sorting a few hundred items on the client side. It felt faster than sorting on the server. It may be due to my client is actually more powerful than my self hosted server, and the internet latency is high.

Pagination definitely makes a huge different. Yet we do not have pagination on feed list today. Maybe we don't need pagination once we have sorting to help us find the feed.

[ldexterldesign]

I'm simply requesting better/sane sorting here

You're conflating sorting with searching/filtering - I suggest creating a new issue for that

Regards

[xfzv]

Somewhat related: On the Feeds page, feeds starting with A-Z (uppercase) are listed before those starting with a-z (lowercase).

Maybe this sorting makes sense for most users, I don't know. Personally, I'd rather have feeds being sorted alphabetically regardless of whether the first letter is uppercase or lowercase, e.g.:

Commits
github
Miniflux
postgresql

instead of (current sorting):

Commits
Miniflux
github
postgresql