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wchristian
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Usually when i look at an author page i want to see what they've been up to recently. I never had a reason for looking at an alphabetical listing there and honestly cannot even think of a use case for that. As such i think reverse chronological order by default would be an improvement.

…nological. Usually when i look at an author page i want to see what they've been up to recently. I never had a reason for looking at an alphabetical listing there and honestly cannot even think of a use case for that. As such i think reverse chrnological order by default would be an improvement.
@wchristian
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Ping?

@oalders
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oalders commented Aug 1, 2011

This gets my vote.

@clintongormley
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Yeah,mine too. If i want to find a particular module, i use auto-find anyway

@autarch
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autarch commented Aug 1, 2011

This makes a lot of sense. I say merge it.

@sartak
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sartak commented Aug 1, 2011

Makes it harder to find a particular module you know to have been written by that author. As long the table is easily sortable though, I don't care too much.

@doy
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doy commented Aug 1, 2011

I tend to disagree. An alphabetical listing is a lot easier to scan when I know that a certain author wrote a module, but can't quite remember the name (which is pretty much my main use of author pages). I can't imagine ever being interested in a date sorting other than for curiosity or something like that.

@rafl
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rafl commented Aug 1, 2011

All the mentioned ways of sorting things make sense under certain circumstances.

As long as they're all supported and persisted in the session for logged-in users, I don't have a strong preference on what the default is. Personally, sorting by date in reverse order is what I do most.

@pjcj
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pjcj commented Aug 1, 2011

I agree with rafl, but since I don't have a personal use case for sorting by date I'll have my default set to alphabetical please.

@rwstauner
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I agree that all are useful and should be available...
I think default sorting by anything other then alphabetical can be confusing, though,
as it may not be obvious what the sort order is.

The joke at my $work is that after a new feature is implemented the first question is always "how is this sorted?"
and i find myself asking that when i look at the author page sorted by anything other than alpha.

Defaulting to descending date sounds like a user setting to me.

@acme
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acme commented Aug 1, 2011

Sometimes I look at an author page trying to remember which module I'm interested in, so alphabetical rules for me.

@dolmen
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dolmen commented Aug 1, 2011

My first use of a chronological order for an author's releases is to find out if the author is active by looking at the date of his latest release. Maybe this information could be presented in another way.

Nowadays, a combined view of CPAN and latests projects on GitHub (and others code repository hosts) where Perl is the main language would be more helpful to determine the author activity in the Perl community.

@doy
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doy commented Aug 1, 2011

@dolmen The latest release for an author already shows up in the left sidebar.

@plu
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plu commented Aug 2, 2011

I'd prefer the default sort order by date, most recent module/release on top. It'd be very convenient to have this as a setting in the preferences pane so we can make anyone happy :).

@ranguard
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ranguard commented Aug 2, 2011

date++ # with preference option available

@monken
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monken commented Aug 2, 2011

alphabetical++

I don't care about the default, though. Before we merge this, I'd like be able to set this setting permanently (as plu said).

@grantm
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grantm commented Aug 3, 2011

alphabetical++

I mostly use the author page to see what areas the person has worked (e.g.: "ooooohhh look at all those shiny DBIx::* modules!"). When the sort is alphabetical, it's obvious how they are ordered. Sort by date is definitely a useful option and I would use it.

@dolmen
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dolmen commented Aug 3, 2011

@grantm: custom sort is already implemented (click on the column headers). This issue is only about the default one.

@doherty
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doherty commented Oct 22, 2011

It might be possible to store the sort state the user has chosen in a cookie, which is then read on other pages of the same type (is there anything to sort aside from the module list on author pages?) to apply the same sort scheme. You can make the default whatever you want, but users who've sorted in a particular way will get the same sorting the next time (until they change it)

@dougwilson
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When you first land on that page, your eyes are drawn to the blue links of the release names. I think not having it default to alpha sorting the release names would be strange, as the first think you'll think is if the list is in some random/jumbled order. If there is a use case for certain people always preferring a certain sort, then I agree with @doherty that when you change the sort, a cookie should be set so that type of page will stay sorted that way unless you change it.

@oalders
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oalders commented Oct 24, 2011

So, I think the consensus is to default to the current ordering but make it configurable. Ideally this sort of thing would be in user prefs, but a cookie is the next best thing. At this point, it's just a feature in search of a volunteer. :)

@ranguard
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Ticket for being able to save preferences ( metacpan/metacpan-api#146 ), once that is done then this can be reworked to use it

@ranguard
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Closing until we have personalisation see Issue #146

@rwstauner
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Table sorting preference is now persisted by the browser. Thanks @oiami!

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