On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 07:59 AM, ro-esp wrote:

Seems to me that we have a consensus that whoever is doing the search should have the options to get the results ordered by biggest, smallest, newest, oldest, busiest or quietest

And all of that (except for "quietest") I'm 99% sure was Mark's intention in creating the search page. Note that the search box stays available when you've clicked on any of those criteria, as if you were meant to be able to do that. It's just that when you actually enter a search term, the sort selection jumps down to "by name." This seems to be either a bug or a part that Mark just forgot to implement. I've now posted this as a bug in a separate topic.
 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 01:24 AM, Curt Gowan wrote:

On the one hand, established group owners want the most active groups to
surface.
On the other hand, the owners of groups that are starting out want a chance to
find their audience.
On the third hand, the operators of a service like LinkedIn or GIO don't want
the first-movers to dominate -- and therefore prevent growth, change, and
innovation on the site.

Seems to me that we have a consensus that whoever is doing the search should have the options to get the results ordered by biggest, smallest, newest, oldest, busiest or quietest.


Is there a reason to worry about people trying to cheat the system?

groetjes/ĝis, Ronaldo

I think there's actually a fundamental mistake or mismatch in the search groups page and I'm calling this a bug, or even bugs, plural. You can search by most popular, most active, newest, or by name, all without entering a search term. But (1) If you select "by name" and don't enter a search term, you get all groups in alphabetical order. Yet if you select "by name" and enter a search term, you get groups containing the term (in their name or description) in *reverse* alpha order. And (2) if you select either of the other three sort criteria, and try to enter a search term, the page jumps back to "by name" and you get the behavior we've been discussing here and in the other thread. Aside from the issues described previously, I think the page is wrongly designed in these two senses, or is buggy. I'm not sure which.
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

There are certainly ways to make more people happy, both group owners and group hungers. Simply allow the left-side display criteria to include filtering by a search term. Everyone can choose their own criterion: most active, most popular, whatever. I'd even argue, on the other side of this, that providing those criteria on their own, *without* the ability to include filtering by a search term, which is the case now, is relatively useless - just as allowing search on a term (called "by name" but not really "by name") without those left-side sort orders is useless. The two need each other.
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

I have two generic thoughts on the subject:

1) What one searches on and what one orders by do not have to be the same thing. One could full imagine searching for "dogs" and ordering by number of members or some such. This leads to letting the user specify the sort order. Many UIs do this by displaying the data in columns with a little triangle at the top to specify sorting ascending or descending by that column.

2) A refinement of 1) is that it is sometimes useful to sort by multiple columns.  E.g., sort by number of members numerically descending and then by name in alpha order ascending. The search window in Thunderbird is an example of this.

Best,

Glenn

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 06:24 PM, Curt Gowan wrote:

On the one hand, established group owners want the most active groups to surface. 

On the other hand, the owners of groups that are starting out want a chance to find their audience. 

On the third hand, the operators of a service like LinkedIn or GIO don't want the first-movers to dominate -- and therefore prevent growth, change, and innovation on the site.

I think that pretty much sums it up.  Each group owner has their own preference as to how the results will be sorted and there's no way to make everyone happy.  Work on the search mechanism would only give users more options on how to sort the results.

Duane

You still have all the issues. A group called Sports whose description states "This group deals with all sports except golf" will display above your Goling for Cats group.
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu