I understand letting the user decide [...] requires a large amount of re-work

I have no idea where you got that impression. I said:

I'd like to support searching "newest nodes first" but the MySQL optimizer will likely fight me on this.
which has nothing to do with the amount of work involved.

Switching from always oldest first to always newest first is only a little less work than letting you choose between the two. The problem is that sorting on descending keys doesn't optimize very well in this version of MySQL (the documentation describes how this is caused by NULL values, but we don't have or even allow NULL values for that field so that shouldn't apply but testing shows that it certainly does).

So there is a moderate amount of work to put in support for searching most recent nodes first. But there is also a good chance that after that work is done the option will often be useless because the optimizer won't work well when you select that option and so your search will not be done.

So it is just a matter of someone finding the time. It isn't a priority because super search is very useful (at least to me) as it is, the work might well not pay off anyway, it isn't as much fun as some other items, and there are more important problems to deal with (to name a few reasons).

                - tye

In reply to Re^3: Super Search Sort Order by tye
in thread Super Search Sort Order by AcidHawk

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