Cannot Activate Descending Sort on Registration Date

Using the “Registered days ago” field does work, but interestingly, you need to tick the box to “descending order” to get most recently registered users at top, which seems (at best) counter-intuitive. In any event, at least something works via this route, so not the worst potential bug in the world.

Hi swampy

just wondering why you think it’s counterintuitive?

most recent dates are “bigger” and so php sorts them to the top of a descending order list.

think 2014, 2013 etc for descending
vs 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 etc for ascending

Sorry, bit confusing in my comment I think, as there are two ‘problems’ actually I’m reporting.

The first is that I can’t get the (absolute date value) registered date to sort with most recent registrants at top at all.

The second is that the “Registered days ago”, which means that ‘big numbers’ are early registrants, seems to get recent registrants at top when set to descending order. This is what I was describing as counter-intuitive, not your example using absolute dates.

Hope that helps clarify things from how I see them.

Hi swampy,

It’s historical and I know confusing, but hard to change without messing with existing users.

When the plugin started The “real” date field was formatted as ‘days ago’ because that was the need then – it was seen as more useful than a date where one then had to think, ok thats a month ago etc. The sorting is on the actual value which is a date field. “the days ago” part is just formatting, the days are not stored – because of course they change everyday (it’s pluggable, so one can write own formatting function).

The registered date is an ‘add-on’ and also just extracted and formatted at display time, but no stored values.

So options for now are
sort by the days ago field
then either display the registered field OR
write own formatting routine for days ago.

NOTE the actual date does show when you hover over the days ago, so info is not lost.

All noted, thanks for the explanation and education on this one. Interesting ‘formatting hack’ by WordPress developers. Suppose only issue then is that the sort on the ‘added’ absolute-formatted date doesn’t seem to work, at least from what I can see.

And to be honest, searching on this message thread and understanding what’s going on, ameliorates about 80% of the issue, making this a pretty low priority item.