Recently my favorite tags have become sorted alphabetically, not in the order I've added them. This happened on several sites of StackExchange where I had favorite tags. It's very comfortable to specify order of tags. For example, before this bug my tags were sorted by importance for me.


The previous behavior was sort of accidental; the tags were ordered by the Id of the row used to store them, and since those rows were usually deleted and re-created, those Ids tended to just increase as you manipulated the list.

But not anymore. In preparation for some coming enhancements, it's now possible to modify these rows in place - and as a result, they aren't necessarily deleted when you remove the tag from a list (or move it between lists).

As a work-around for the folks who relied on the old behavior, I threw together a userscript: Reorderable Favorite Tags.

This'll restore the previous behavior: tags will remain in the order in which you add them, and also allow you to reorder the tags at will by dragging them around (you have to start editing them first though, so as to avoid inadvertently reordering them while trying to click).


Try it & let me know what you think. If it works for you, I'll throw it up on Stack Apps for others to use / enhance.

  • 1
    Thanks for you feedback! Just two questions: 1. What is the reason for not implementing draggable tags as in your userscript (at least via user option)? It seem to me that it would useful for many people and won't take much time. 2. Is it worth creating feature-request question for this behavior or not? – Vadim Ovchinnikov May 17 '18 at 6:07
  • I personally like the addition of alphabetized tags. In fact, there was a feature request for this a few years ago. – Stevoisiak May 17 '18 at 15:50
  • I think there's already a feature-request for this somewhere, @Vadim, but you might have to poke around a bit. As for why we haven't implemented it... Quite honestly, I don't think anyone knows how often folks use these tags as an ordered "bookmark list" - a big underlying reason for this change was to allow auditing of changes made to the list, as up to now we've kept no record of it (I've actually had to rely on Google's cache in the past to retrieve lost tag subscriptions for someone). We haven't really given this feature enough attention in recent years; got a lot of ground to make up. – Shog9 May 17 '18 at 20:49

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .