In WP Admin -> Posts, sorting the list by Author actually sorts by Author ID

[aneesme]

When I click on the author column title to sort the post listing by the author, it sorts by author id and I see the list messed up.

This was always the case; now it's just more visible.

The argument is that the wp_posts table shouldn't be JOINed to the global wp_users table, which can get quite large on Multisite setups.

Also, we call dashboard only the first screen: wp-admin/index.php

What you're refering to is the administration area.

One could argue that the author column simply shouldn't be sorted. You can already click a single author's name to filter them down. If you can filter, and the sort is buggy, why have it? It could be implemented instead as a plugin.

The user's expectation would be that it sorts by wp_users.displayname. If that's not acceptable, I agree that we should disable sorting. We did the same on the Users screen when it came to post counts.

@scribu, I don't think that there is a way to order authors by author name without using a JOIN clause. A join would indeed affect the performance seriously having a large posts or users table but currently order_by takes place only for fields from the posts table.

There could probably be an extra screen (implemented by a plugin) for listing this, but a join-driven one.

make 'author' column non-sortable

In [21743]:

Remove not so useful author column sorting. Props scribu. fixes #17141