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Back in 2010, a request was made for a search operator for protected questions. This hasn't been implemented, so I thought I'd look at it from a different angle.

In November of 2016, we added the ability to see a full list of protected questions to the 10K tools page. This doesn't completely solve the problem posed by the search operator request, but it does at least make it possible to see all of the protected questions, fifty at a time.

I'm requesting a solution that will allow the sort function to actually sort the entire list. Right now, if you go to a list of protected questions with more than fifty items and sort by one of the columns, username, for example, the sort function only sorts the fifty items on the current page. This means that if you're trying to review all of the questions Community has protected, but there are ten pages of results, you have to look at ten pages to find them all.

So, how to address this? I thought of a few options, which could be done individually or all together but they all have issues:

  1. add a "view all" button somewhere on the page.
  2. fix the sort so that it sorts all pages instead of the active page only.
  3. add a "search" function.

Now, I don't have access to these lists on all sites and 700 protected questions on some of the sites I do is a long list... (or 23K+ on SO)... so option 1 would probably not be a great solution... but it would work... or for sites with more than you'd want on a single page, you could turn "view all" into "view 1K/page"... or whatever limit didn't cost too much.

Fixing sort to actually sort the entire list would probably be the best option to actually make the feature fully functional but I'm guessing that would take some work. It also wouldn't be that helpful if you wanted a user with a name starting somewhere in the middle of the alphabet and you had 15 pages of results, though.

Adding a search function would be great for limiting the results to specific users or even date ranges, possibly, but this isn't already built into the page, so, again, would likely take more work and it wouldn't help if you wanted the full list sorted somehow (e.g. by date asked)

Maybe there are other options that would address this need?

Can we find a more useful way to sort the entire list of protected questions?

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This is done: clicking any of the column headers now sorts the entire list by that column; clicking it twice sorts in the other direction. Paging through the list respects whatever sort you've chosen.

Screenshot of page 17 of the Protected Questions tool, when sorted by the "PROTECTED ON" column, ascending

Also:

Big thanks to Adam Lear for helping to get this done!

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