Sorting the Members List

Is there anything that can be done to add sorting ability to th emembers list? It would be nice to be able to sort people by the different criteria, like location. Scrolling through 30 pages is a little awkward.

Jim the only thought that I can add to that is the question of location. Larry tried to persuade people in a thread to at least put in a general location in their profiles....which didn't stay on topic.

Location has always been a problem with people who feel they can be "found", so they won't put that information in.

Steve,
If folks want to share their info they will, that really shouldn't affect the bubble-sort. Just allow for 'null' in that field in the database. My programming skills are far too rusty, but it ought to be a piece of cake.

You can already sort by any of the required/automatically-generated fields that show in the member list: name, join date, and number of posts. (Although the fact that the name is a single field rather than first/last name makes that less than useful.)

The real issue is that all of the other fields are strictly optional, so there will always be a (large?) percentage of members with missing data when you go to do a sort. Even if you allow for that (which any intelligently-designed sort algorithm can do), they're just raw text with zero control over the user's inputs...pretty much useless as meaningful sort keys.