The ordering of "Show posts from user" should be changed

[TSP]

Hi!

After upgrading to IPB 3 we and our users noticed that the ordering of posts when viewing all posts posted by user X had changed from how it worked in earlier versions. I originally thought the new ordering was a mistake and decided to submit a ticket about it today. The reply I got however was that the ordering worked as as intended.

In our opinion the current ordering is confusing and frustrating.

Here is the list of posts posted by our user L4r5, one of our most active members: http://www.diskusjon.no/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=user_activity&mid=55736&userMode=content

Here is two pictures of how the first page of results looked like when I viewed his profile. (Be aware: large pictures, both of them 2MB)



As you can see the result the second time is different from how it was the first time.

I'm not sure how to explain the current ordering in english, but lets give it a try. The order of the results are decided based on which topic (from the ones the user specified have replied to earlier) that have the newest reply made to it, from any user. It then retrieves all the replies the specified user made within that topic and show them in descending order on the dates. Then it shows all the posts the user wrote in the topic that had the second newest activty etc.

While this might work on small forums it makes very little or no sense to order it like that on larger forums. As you can see the results on the first page changed to a completely different result the second time. The pictures were taken 30 minutes apart, but the same thing can easily be seen happening when there is much less time between aswell.

This makes the list confusing in my eyes. But really starts to get frustrating when you try to navigate in the pages, you never know what might be coming since the order can have been completely changed if a topic the user have been active in gets a reply between switching pages. It also is not very useful when users for example is active in our most active topic and they might have many hundreds replies in them. Which means the 40 pages of results might all be showing posts from just one topic some times.

The sensible way to order this would be to order it like you did in earlier versions. Where posts were ordered by time and there was nothing more complicated than that. When I want to see all posts from a user I dont want to see 1000 "random" posts from the user. I want to actually see the 1000 latest replies the user made on the forum - ordered from newest to oldest.

[TSP]

Any hope for this to be changed in 3.2?

Just wanted to bump this since it's still really frustrating to read trough users posts both on our forum and other forums the way it works today. On large forums it's simply impossible.