Add alphabetizing to users' page

[filosofo]

If you have a lot of users, it's really helpful to be able to browse them by letter of the alphabet.

I've applied this patch to a live site with over 40,000 users, and it's working well.

filosofo, interesting bug, but I can't think of its use. What is a scenario where you find it useful to browse through user names?

Specifically, what scenario would the search capability not cover? You know the first letter of their username, but nothing else?

foolswisdom, you're probably right that in most scenarios the search is adequate to find a user. However, I think being able to browse your users has benefits for user experience. It allows you to break the users into manageable chunks so that browsing is actually possible (if you have a lot--like my client with over 40,000--then just paging alone is impractical).

Without this feature, it could seem as though your list of users is a black box: unfathomable, unless you know already what to search for.

Besides, alphabetical sorting is a common feature of most software that has a large database of users; it's something you expect to be able to do.

Also, I've used this to find someone whose name I might not know how to spell correctly. For example, if I know Mark Jaquith is a user, but I'm not sure whether it's marcj, markj, mjaquith, jakewith_m, or whatever, eyeballing the M's and J's usually will be faster than trying to guess alternate spellings for the search.

For about 10 additional lines of code, you can have a feature that would be difficult to implement just with a plugin and that makes the user experience much better.