Feature Request- Sort article subject starting at X position

[MikeU]

Would it be possible to add an option to sort the article subjects starting at the "X" position?
Many articles are posted with a sequence of characters that make it hard to sort and group the articles.

Example:

[143713]-DEF-1
[143714]-ABC-1
[143715]-GHI-1
[143716]-ABC-2
[143718]-ABC-3
[143719]-DEF-2

Sorted at position 8 would sort the list as:

[143714]-ABC-1
[143716]-ABC-2
[143718]-ABC-3
[143713]-DEF-1
[143719]-DEF-2
[143715]-GHI-1

Maybe make it a right click sub-menu on subject where you can enter a number.

If the built-in sorting does not allow this then you might be able to add another column called "Subject (Filtered)" that strips away the first "X" characters the user chooses.

Thank you for considering this feature!

[alex]

organizing headers into collections and sets automatically is a kind of sorting them out. do you have those enabled by default? although it won't change the order in your case when there is post number first.

did you try to use view menu->quick filter bar, then in the subject field you can type e.g. abc to see those abc records, you can also use much more sofisticated filters, the actual expression depends whether wildmats are enabled edit menu->properties->search/import, search syntax.

then you can also select those abc records and use context menu->custom collections, add to collection to group them together.

if constant shift the resulting order will be mostly unpredictable since we hit sometimes the middle of a word so we would get almost no sorting at all.

what could make sense - to start with the first letter character, if no letter sort by whole string, it may increase the sort time somewhat (e.g. opening newsgroup time), difficult to tell, i could try to check that. not sure if there could be undesirable consequences, or if there are such consequences it will be worse than the current situation when bad formed subjects by the same poster may cause mixing of his different posts under the same collection.

[MikeU]

organizing headers into collections and sets automatically is a kind of sorting them out. do you have those enabled by default? although it won't change the order in your case when there is post number first.

I already have the collections enabled and it does help.

did you try to use view menu->quick filter bar, then in the subject field you can type e.g. abc to see those abc records, you can also use much more sofisticated filters, the actual expression depends whether wildmats are enabled edit menu->properties->search/import, search syntax.
then you can also select those abc records and use context menu->custom collections, add to collection to group them together.

I do this when I am searching for a certain subject and it works quite well. The problem I run into is when I am browsing thousands of lines(collections) on a variety of subjects and they are all out of order.

For example, use the search service and search for "a.b.teevee&^nzb" for the past 5 days. You will have 650 collections returned. While browsing the list, it would be easier to visually group all the similar subjects together by stripping away the first 32 characters and sorting the list by subject. I realize this won't work for all cases because of the varied length "garbage" in the beginning of the subjects between posters but I figured this would be a good starting place without overly complicating it for the user.

[alex]

For example, use the search service and search for "a.b.teevee&^nzb" for the past 5 days.

The result would be the same if to ignore characters preceding the first letter.

Sort by number also makes sense since it reflects the post order, so if considering adding that then only as an option.

But if just looking for something specific the subject quick filter can be applied.

[MikeU]

The result would be the same if to ignore characters preceding the first letter.

Sort by number also makes sense since it reflects the post order, so if considering adding that then only as an option.

Thank you for considering to add these features.