Default (Last active) sorting doesn't show some members

[sooskriszta]

Picking up from ​https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5611#comment:6

It seems odd that some members would be shown for one sort and not for another.

[r-a-y]

"Last active" is the default sorting behavior. This sort depends on a user having some sort of activity, so it makes sense that we filter out members who have never logged in before.

However, I see your point about the "Newest registered" sort relying on the member's last activity. In my opinion, we shouldn't filter by a member's last activity here. For comparison, the "Alphabetical" sort does not filter on a member's last activity.

[boonebgorges]

In my opinion, we shouldn't filter by a member's last activity here. For comparison, the "Alphabetical" sort does not filter on a member's last activity.

This change is OK with me. We'll need to sort by u.ID DESC in this case.

[slaFFik]

Check other components as well.

[sooskriszta]

Yup, just sort, don't filter. Or in other words, just run the sort, don't add a limit on the number of results or how long ago the activity was...

[imath]

Let's try to work on this during 8.0.0. Who's volunteering to submit a patch, before I do 😉 ?

[imath]

I was very optimistic in my last comment 😱.

I've been looking into this more deeply, and it's not just a matter of sort Vs filter. The active order is getting user IDs from the activity table as long as there were active once (the where clause is looking for the last_activity activity type. It's pretty clever to do so as when a user is spammed their activities are deleted. It also filters out 'non-activated' users when on a non multisite configs (this is needed unless BP_SIGNUPS_SKIP_USER_CREATION is defined to true). So I'm not sure we should change anything here.

Instead and to avoid having this confusing behavior (alphabetical showing members active is not), I believe we should filter out from alphabetical the same users 😊.

I believe it's safer not to touch to this part so close to the 8.0.0-beta1 release. Let's try to have a look at it during next release.