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I have many tags marked as "interesting" and others as "ignored". (I use Java at work, I'm a Cocoa guy by night, any anything dealing with Windows/.NET/C# simply doesn't apply to me.) When tags are added to the list in the right navbar, they appear in the order in which they were added. There are several problems with this:

  • It can be difficult to visually locate a tag quickly, unless you have memorized its location.
  • The tags appear as the same gray boxes like everywhere on SO, but with a small "x" afterward, and they wrap based on size. This tends to leave a ragged right margin and wasted space.
  • Ordering based on when the tag was added is not always the most intuitive default. Various users might prefer to view them alphabetically, by popularity, recent activity, etc.

It would be nice to introduce a tabbed interface to switch between various orderings, and remember the value in the cookie, profile, etc. Coupled with this, perhaps users could specify a custom ordering that works best for them? (Currently the workaround is to copy all the tag names, remove them all, and re-add them in the desired order, but this is obviously annoying.)

Thoughts?

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  • One really handy way to sort might be by number of questions/answers in the given tag (or maybe even by rep in the tag?) - that way you can trust your favorites to generally be at one end.
    – Cascabel
    Nov 2 '10 at 14:43
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I don't agree with "Olafur Waage" in that's too much work with little benefit.

I will repeat an update I made to my own question (when I asked the same question as the one you're reading now - silly me - my question is now flagged as duplicate):

However, having read those others, I have a suggestion for the developers: clearly you are now keeping a list of selected tags in a table.

If you add one integer field to this table, and give us a 'upvote' link (like you have now in front of a comment), we could very easily alter the order of tags (if you would show them according to this new field).

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  • 4
    Seconded here. It doesn't have to be anything overly complicated. We don't need groups or categories or multiple orderings -- just the same thing we have now, only with a way to change the order that doesn't involve deleting and re-adding everything.
    – hobbs
    Aug 20 '10 at 21:16
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I think it's to much work for little benefit. I agree with alphabetical order. That way you can always figure out where the tag is.

Regarding the X next to the tag, heres a MSO feature request about that.

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  • I think alpha ascending is great. I remove all tags, then re-add in ascending order, which is silly, I know.
    – Anonymous
    Jul 7 '09 at 3:41
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The interesting tags should definitely be sorted. It's hard to find the one you're after when you have over 30-40. I'm actually surprised that this feature has not been implemented yet, especially as one bin for all question along with points/credits/reputation for users are two driving forces of SE, this is what defines SE and what makes this site different from other Q&A website. Tags sorting is a must otherwise it gets messy.

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Adding in tags and watching them append to the end of the list is visually helpful. Would be nice to then come again around when next viewing a page that has the tag list to be sorted in alphabetical order. That would be friendly.

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Here's a userscript that'll allow this for Watched (but not ignored) tags: Reorderable favorite tags - drag & drop ordering for the Watched tag sidebar

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