Add sorting options to search

It seems kinda random to me how the results come back.

It would be really nice if I could:

1. Sort by person, then by date descending
2. Sort by date descending

Created by: PWKad

To tack on to @cmichaelgraham here, it would be really nice to have a way to sort by your mentions so that when you get mentioned you can see when and where it was most recently, which is especially helpful in very busy chats.

Created by: AshleyGrant

Yeah, if search results came back in reverse chronological (sort by date descending) order by default, that would be awesome. The search feature is great, but having the seemingly random results ordering has made it rather less useful as the Aurelia channel has gotten bigger.

Created by: gishmel

I concur the reverse chronological (sort by date descending) seems to be a great default ordering method and +1 if you allow more customization on top of that. Currently it is as stated not as useful as it should be due to seemingly random return order.

Created by: mttmccb

Please, this would be so useful, especially as older result can be irrelevant (as a result of some change) and thus the searching for a needle (the post after a certain date) in the haystack starts.

Created by: weaktyper

Created by: ggranum

+1 - The integrated search is nearly worthless without date ordering on active pages. Ok, ok, it's merely excruciating, not worthless.

Created by: ejsmith

Please!!!

Please sort the results by time. This is a big deal if you want the search to be useful.

Any plans to implement this in the future?

+1 to allowing normal (not reverse) chronological order.

Created by: samgoeta

Dear Gitter, could you please offer reverse-chronological results? I am trying to add Gitter to Zapier but it's not possible without reverse-chronological data (see documentation.

Please fix it, Zapier will extend Gitter's features to hundreds of popular APIs such as Dropbox, Slack or Google Spreadsheet.

Context: #1361 and please: the sooner, the better.

(A recent use case: putting chronological order to the list of chat messages at https://discourse.trueos.org/t/what-is-wayland/284/4 was horribly time-consuming. It's not simply a case of drafting, and then manually sorting what's in the draft. It's the horror of ploughing through a disorderly list of search results, trying to make timeline sense of things whilst the Gitter-given order fights against gaining that sense; whilst the targets pulse (expand and contract) so I must avoid pointing at them whilst dragging the …; and so on. The whole thing quickly becomes frustrating.)

A better UI to search results will allow Gitter to really shine. Thanks.

Created by: AshleyGrant

Definitely a sticky point we want to address and has been touched before but nothing solid enough to ship and other things have been prioritized above.

@MadLittleMods March 15, 2017 12:52 PM

I was just told by @MadLittleMods that there are no plans to implement this utterly fundamental failing of Gitter. Now that Gitter is being open sourced, I've been told I'm free to implement search sorting myself.

This request has been ignored for two years now, and now we're being told to implement it ourselves. This is completely unacceptable. But I guess we have no choice but to accept it.

@ashleygrant if you'd like to chat about the transition to open source, ircs://chat.freenode.net/#opensourcedesign