Re: Members in alphabetical order

Posted by GregChapman on Oct 20, 2014; 9:07am
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Members-in-alphabetical-order-tp7592053p7592074.html

Wheatland Garden wrote

I want the list of members to be in alphabetical order by member name, and haven't figured out how to achieve this.  The reason is that Members can see the list of Members, and can use it to send individual email if necessary.

First can we clarify if you are talking about those you have placed in the "Members" group or simply users who have registered but may have done so in error or have no continuing interest in your forum.
Second why would any one want to email anyone on the basis of a name in a list. Surely the only valid reason to email someone is to respond privately to a post on the forum and they can do that by clicking on the author's username.

The default order seems to be the order in which I originally entered members (alphabetical by real name, with some strays at the end),

Users are listed in order of volume of posts.

but now that people have registered and chosen user names, this order doesn’t make sense, and over time there will be more people tacked onto the end of the list in whatever order they happen to arrive.

They move up the list as they post more.

I want the list to make sense to Members.  Alphabetical order would not seem to be an esoteric expectation.

It seems to me - and I now suspect to Nabble - that encouraging the emailing of users of a forum is to be discouraged. It simply encourages spam.

Take a look through the support forum and you'll see it is far more common for administrators to request an internal PM system and to remove any ability to email users. This, after all, is the conventional approach on a forum.