Change default issues/PRs sort to "Recently updated"

[mojavelinux]

The Newest sort option in the issue tracker is rarely useful and not at all what I expect as the default sort. I want to see where the activity is. That's likely what needs my attention most. An update to an old issue and the addition of a new issue should have the same weight. Otherwise, old issues with recent activity stay buried.

I propose modifying the URL of the main Issues tab so the issues are sorted by Recently updated (in descending order) instead of Newest. That can be accomplished by adding the following query string:

?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc

[sindresorhus]

👍 I always sort it by Recently updated.

@paulmolluzzo @hkdobrev What do you think?

[hkdobrev]

I think it's useful for some cases, but not useful for others.

Of course it is useful when you to respond to latest activity, but not useful when there's a high-activity open-source repository and you want to try to close new issues and PRs fast and look at some long-running issues/PRs just from time-to-time. Imagine issues with a lot of +1 comments or PRs with a lot of code review comments from others.

Whether Recently updated should be the default depends on what you do most often. For me personally most of the time I'd prefer the default sorting of Newest. Especially for work repositories, even the activity is from a few people, I'd prefer to look at the exact same order every time similar to a Trello board which we are also using. We have Slack and GitHub notifications for every comment.

I'm not sure if this is a commonly shared logic and I'm not even sure having Recently updated by default would not be useful to me and I just don't realise it yet.

What do you think of having a button which toggles between the two instead of having to click the drop down to the right?

[paulmolluzzo]

No strong opinion from me, except that I might get confused by changing the default (I don't know for sure).

I don't usually sort issues, tbh. When I'm triaging maybe?

[mojavelinux]

Adding a toggle button like @hkdobrev suggested would be my second choice.

In fact, it's the cognitive strain caused by the Sort drop down that initially motivated this request. I was finding that I'd navigate to a GitHub repository, click Issues, not immediately see the issue I wanted, click Sort and then... ... ... (blink) ... ... try to read the words and figure out which one applied to my case. The one I really need (Recently updated) sits second to the bottom, below options related to comments which sort of look the same.

That makes me think that the underlying issue here is that the Sort drop down causes cognitive strain. Too many options without enough differentiation.

[mojavelinux]

I'll provide a use case that explains why Recently updated comes up the most often.

I pick an issue to work on (perhaps because it came in via e-mail), do some coding, send a PR that references it (or perhaps someone else does). That's the issue on my mind (and others I worked on that day). I go to the Issues tab to follow-up on the issues, perhaps to add some additional notes or get information from an ongoing discussion. Where are those issues? No where to be found. Instead, what I see is new issues that came in the meantime that have nothing to do with the activity going on in the project.

The projects that this most affects are projects with lots of activity, because new issues are always coming in and occupying the top slots in the Newest sort.

[hkdobrev]

Despite the obvious stand against options in this extension (which is quite right), this is the feature I feel is most suitable for an option. Of course in best case scenario that would be an option provided by GitHub itself similar to default diff view - split vs unified. When you choose a sort view, this could be persisted until you change it.

So I have 2 suggestions without adding options to the extension:

1. Add just a toggle button for newest/updated issues.
2. Implement persisted sort across repos which always uses the sort option you've selected last.

[mojavelinux]

Persisted sort definitely sounds intriguing.

[hkdobrev]

Just wanted to say I've tried this a couple of weeks ago and it isn't easy. Initially I thought I could fiddle directly with the URL - nope, GitHub changes the URLs in a few ways and also there are multiple URLs with the same search (e.g. /search/label/bug is the same as /search?q=label.... and others). Then I've started playing with clicking the sort drop down and around that time I lost interest. With persisting the sorting you need to consider pages where both issues and PRs are listed and pages where there is a sorting, but with different sort options and the chrome storage is asynchronous and the sorting would change after a while and sometimes is slow and so on and so on. I don't say it's impossible to do, it isn't, but it's not easy. And it's really easy to do from the back-end just like how GitHub persists diff style - unified vs split.

That said I just wanted to warn people who think about taking this, I'll be willing to assist when possible.

However I think it'd be more useful to contact the GitHub team about it and say "please" 😄

[giampaolo]

Definitively something I'm also looking for.

[pgorod]

I would also be interested. While it's not implemented, if anybody knows a workaround (some browser extension that can tweak html, for example), please share here. My desired behavior would be to change the tabs saying "Issues" and "Pull Requests" to a different URL (to specify my sorting preference). Thanks.

[BlaineBradbury]

yes, recently updated is the way to go