No, it’s not, not on the first click of “submit”. You want to first search for something, then do things to the search results. Not both at the same time.

I'm sorry. You really seem hung up on this "search" word. Which is obviously a symptom of a problem with how I've laid out the page. When you first visit the page its doing a search, more specifically a search for your message records that are in a given folder. And when you first visit the page its perfectly reasonable to expect that you might want to move all or most or some of those records to a specific folder. It seems to me that you want to force people to do this twice. I don't really understand why except that it seems to have to do with the word searching. Apparently you don't feel that "show all records in folder X" is searching and that we have to use a different term or something. I don't really get it. Would simply changing the word "Search" to "Show" make things more clear?

Just to clarify I expect a common usage pattern will be: 1. click on link in cb to go to inbox; 2. select a group of messages; 3. select a destination for them to go to; 4. submit.

Now that ive written that down I can see that since the destination will most likely be the deleted folder we should provide an easy way to shortcut to it. So mea-culpa there.

Another usage pattern i expect to see is: 1. click on link in cb to go to inbox; 2. go through visible nodes placing them in distinct destination folders. 3. submit. This is actually the usage pattern I wanted when I started this patch. I wanted to be able to search and sort into multiple folders because of my admin duties here. It can be difficult to keep track of messages to and from people on different subjects and I wanted a way to deal with that easily. Being able to "sort out my inbox into groups" is something that I want to do without having to submit for each group. It gets really annoying. So I guess its safe to say that that feature will stay in some form or another. Perhaps as a "sticky" setting.

I don’t know if you as the one who developed the code and interface can appreciate how confounding that form is for someone else.

I asked people before, and I didn't really get much feedback of this sort. But I'll be the first to admit that this is hardly the slickest design. But the things I would have thought people would care about dont seem to have come up... :-)

The current one simply has too many orthogonal parts at once, so it requires a lot of headspace in order to be operated successfully, when there’s really no need for it to be so demanding, even if disarming it requires smoke and mirrors.

Ok, now im following you better. I think i can see what you mean. A list of links down the side with the different folder names in them and a reduced set of controls for dealing with them, at least by default. Or something like that.

BTW, since you might be patching this please try to remember: Not breaking private messages from existing clients is a very important point. Backwards compatibility with existing code is pretty well mandatory.

As for testy tone: I understand that it’s frustrating to get a load of criticism first thing when you release something you put a lot of work in. And I appreciate the features, I do. I think the work is cool so far.

No its cool. Now that your feedback is making sense to me I dont mind. :-) Some of your original comments still dont make sense to me entirely, probably because I'm too close to the implementation, but between this reply and tyes comments I'm getting an idea of what you think is wrong and needs to be changed, and thats great.

Ill say something as and aside about user options: I've seen that harmony on this site is only really had when there are a reasonable number of options available. Somebody always hates a feature that somebody else simply must have. When one of those people has the power to provide a patch, its hard and IMO unreasonable to say no.

Anyway, cheers, and i look forward to those patches. :-)