Feature Request - sort issues by date

[Manish-Giri]

I'm not sure what (if any) the current sort order is, but if you select a tag like JavaScript to filter projects, the resulting list links to a lot of projects where the issues were labelled a long time back (some more than a year ago). Some of these issues also have PRs open against them, but with the labels still on, while in other issues, people have commented that they're working on it.

It would be nice to have the list of projects be sorted by some sort of recent activity - either by the date the issues were created, or some other criteria. My point is - it would be nice to have recently opened issues at the top, as compared to very old ones. This would help people get to active issues much faster.

Also, I must say - this site is awesome! Keep up the good work 👍

[aph3rson]

I know this is an old issue, but I still wanted to make a comment.

I really like your idea - there's a lot of issues on projects that might be in our list, but the issues haven't been updated in a long time. There's some theory/ideological discussion to be had here, though - do we want to discourage users from looking at old issues? Looking at projectsService.js:89, it looks like we're randomly sorting the results, which may have been for a reason. Perhaps a better method would be to allow users to sort the results if they prefer.

On the technical side of things, there's no collection at present (dbb47ff) of any date-type information, short of the time the issue count was retrieved (to implement caching, which will be changed per #261 and #546). However, the created/updated time is exposed in both the Github Issues API (which is what we're currently using) and the Github Search API (see https://github.com/up-for-grabs/up-for-grabs.net/issues/567#issuecomment-303563550), and can be sorted based on the created/updated time for each issue with some GET variables - we'd simply need to decide if we want to use them.

@shiftkey might be best to answer this, but I'm thinking a sort option might be best, with the current (random) sort set by default.

[lancerutkin]

Was there ever a decision made on this? I'd love to help on handling this if I could. I just started using the site and, similar to others, found that a lot of the repos I was going into were not actively being maintained.

It would be nice to sort based on some activity metric. It might also be nice to include some other sort of relevance metric. I've got some experience working with GitHub API and would be happy to contribute if this is a direction the site wants to go.

[shiftkey]

@lancerutkin

Was there ever a decision made on this? I'd love to help on handling this if I could.

We lack the ability to update the site content dynamically using the GitHub API, and historically the issue count is fetched on the client which has can be rate-limited easily. I was able to do a small proof-of-concept using GitHub Actions in #1257 and now that it's stable I'd like to explore further what we can do in this area.

If we can get to a place where we run a background task to regenerate the site content and update the repository history, I think that would unlock a lot of fun things like this.