Provide sortable columns in private messages, similar to latest topics

[tobiaseigen]

Hey @eviltrout - thanks for adding column headers to messages. I like it!

I thought it was going to come with column sorting, like the typical latest view. I am just now trying to work through a huge backlog of messages as admin, and it would be very handy to be able to sort by which messages have had replies or been viewed.

I think this is mostly a feature for moderator or admin users who have a larger number of messages to manage, so I understand if it’s not a high priority. I can see via this handy data explorer query that it is only me as user 1 and discobot who have thousands of messages in our inbox, sent out automagically to new users. Ordinary civilians tend to have only a handful if any.

Filtering in this view would be helpful too at some stage, to allow us to bulk archive welcome messages that have no reply, for example.

[Hooksmith]

We have a group on our forum for private community questions and it is not typical for it to get up to 200 messages at once. We’d like to address these in-order, but it takes a lot of scrolling unless you leave the tab open (but the inbox doesn’t live-update as people address messages, so at some point you would want to refresh to see updated state anyway…).

I know that @sam mentioned here that the general recommendation is to keep Inbox size pretty small:

[Paid] Sortable group messages

FYI, our general use case is to be very strict about archiving. If you keep your team inbox reasonably clear there is very little need for these kind of features. Not strictly against column sorting in core, but its very rare to be needed. @carlokok do you tend to keep your “team inbox” reasonably clear as well?

We definitely agree with this, but our user activity volume is high and we address these in batches, so it is typically not feasible to us to keep the inbox size small (i.e. the 200 number accumulates in only a few days). We also would rather not use a different mode to answer these questions (i.e. email) because we’d like to keep our users on one product to keep things simple and intuitive for them.

It would be awesome if the columns in private messages acted the same way as the Latest lists so we could just view the group and immediately see the oldest posts at the top, without first scrolling all the way to the bottom. Using a public category doesn’t work for our use case since we need the contents of the messages to stay private between the group and the user.

How much effort would this be to implement and would it be #pr-welcome ?