Last modified: 2014-08-28 22:43:24 UTC
Currently, [[Special:ActiveUsers]] filters only by alphabetical order, but there should be an option - whether it be checkbox, switch or whatever - that filters by least to most number of actions committed or vice versa. Example: filtering so that User:X who has 1842 edits in the last 30 days is at the top of the list while User:Y who only has one edit in the last 30 days appears at the bottom.
The topic of ActiveUsers came up recently as it was causing quite a bit of server strain. Originally we were just going to disable ActiveUsers completely on the Wikimedia cluster, but instead Aaron Schulz managed to rework the backend to make it more performant. A lot of the use cases of ActiveUsers don't need sorting (e.g. "As a Community Liaison I want to message all active users on a particular wiki to inform them about software updates."). That said, this would be a cool feature to have, but sorting algorithms on massive datasets aren't always cheap from a performance standpoint. We may have to consider not doing this if that's the case. CCing Aaron for his input.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 23237 ***
