Reordering of issues in a milestone is not working

[magnesj]

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Drag and drop for Milestones works correctly using the feature locally. But when the page is reloaded, the original ordering is restored.

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• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

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[labudis]

@labudis I've just hit an issue with using sub-issues to handle reordering... I no longer have visibility of labels. I use labels to help prioritise issues and these are visible in Milestones but not the list of sub-issues. 😢

That's a good point. If viewing labels in-line is important the sub-issues view will be too simplistic. However, if you opt to use Projects, it is possible to display labels as one of the Fields in the Table view.

[basiszwo]

I was in contact with support who encouraged me to write here.

Having sortable issues in a milestone was a great feature and simple to use. It gave me a simple yet effective way to prioritize issues for a given milestone.

Having sortable sub-issues doesn't seem to have the same effect, as I still cannot prioritize issues of a given milestone.

I am a developer myself and having sortable issues doesn't look like a super expensive feature. That being said while for sure I don't know about your internals.

Anyway, this is a major setback for me. Using projects is way too much hassle. Also it adds a lot of friction for managing issues. Using sub-issues doesn't help me.

I am wondering what drove you to the decision to remove this feature in the new UI?

Finally, I would love if you can reconsider your decision!

Thank you very much!

[richardpawson]

@labudis Why would you just deliberately remove a feature that users valued and liked and try to impose something quite different on them? I can't see that there would be a clash between the original feature and what you have added. Please just put the sorting-within-a-milestone feature back in.

[rgoldberg]

We've also looked at usage analytics and found that less than 0.02% of our Issues users are interacting with the Milestones custom-ordering feature in a typical month. The combination of low usage, the availability of alternatives and some technical complexity led us to this decision as we were redesigning the Milestones experience.

What percentage of the Milestones (not Issues) users used the custom-ordering feature in a typical month?

Maybe users didn't know that they could reorder issues in a milestone; it might have been a "marketing" problem, not a functionality problem.

[magnesj]

Thank you for bringing the feature back, now it's happy GitHubbing again :-)

[dmkenney]

Select Topic Area

Bug

Feature Area

Issues

Body

Drag and drop for Milestones works correctly using the feature locally. But when the page is reloaded, the original ordering is restored.

Guidelines

• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

I can confirm this is happening for me as well.

[yacine-harbi]

I can confirm this. Tried Chrome, Edge and Safari on mobile. Not a cache issue. A POST request is sent ending in prioritize.json, the response is a json: {"updated_at":1742979273}

[yacine-harbi]

The error happens because in the POST body (https://github.com/{owner}/{repo}/milestone/{milestone_number}/prioritize.json), item_id and prev_id are using the same id. If you replace item_id with the correct target id the issue is reordered. You can do it with a fetch in dev console.

[stevekrouse]

This bug is happening for me too

[pontikis]

This is happening for me, too. With any browser.

[qmarcos]

Same here!

[Birgerev]

Now sorting has been removed completely?? wtf

[richardpawson]

Yes - the handles for moving tickets within the Milestone have just been removed!

[dmkenney]

What a joke. Microsoft can't get somebody to fix this issue?

[haileyFitabase]

I use milestones in nearly an identical way to Paul and will run into the same problem. I can absolutely appreciate the data to support the idea that this isn’t a useful feature for most users. However, for those of us that do use milestones in this way, this means we now have to create an entirely new process for managing work. I have a team of three developers at our largest. A kanban-style board is too much for us, and now I have to take time out of critical, revenue-generating product and development time to create, hone, and teach a process to replace one we have used for nearly seven years. This is disappointing.

…

On Thu, Apr 3, 2025 at 8:18 AM Paul Masri-Stone ***@***.***> wrote: @labudis <https://github.com/labudis> OK, so I've decided to learn about Projects, and I can see that I can prioritise using a Kanban board, which is overkill for me but it's fine. I'm assuming I can see labels against issue 'cards'??? However I've hit a wall. I work for an organisation. They own the repo and I am the developer. So I cannot create or manage Projects. So I'd have to go to them and ask them to create a new Project anytime I need one, in my case for each release. This is not manageable. My conclusion is that Projects is not usable for me, as I'm not the organisation repo organiser. Maybe that's a permissions thing, but still I've got to have some back and forth to get that set up for me. And it's more complex than I need - I'd just be using it because I can't use Milestones any more. And Sub-issues are not usable because they don't show labels. So I'm a bit stuck. I've invested time today to find out about these things because, right now, my workflow got broken... and there's now a hole in Github. Please bring back custom-sorting for milestones, as they are really useful... even if it's for a minority of users. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#154841 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AKR2EWVYOYPEDLZNXLMN6UL2XVGM5AVCNFSM6AAAAABZUDI6QGVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTENZRGUZDKOA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[magnesj]

@haileyFitabase , lets hope enough people upvote this feature.

[labudis]

I wanted to take a moment to express my sincere appreciation for all the feedback you've shared in this forum. Although the custom-ordering feature may not have high overall usage, it is clear that it has a passionate base of users who rely on it for their daily planning needs. Your insights have also highlighted some gaps and limitations in alternative solutions like sub-issues and Projects.

Now for the good news: I am excited to announce that my team and I are actively working on a plan to reintroduce custom ordering to Milestones. Please stay tuned for updates coming very soon!

Thank you for your continued support and valuable contributions.

[nblumhardt]

Thanks for bringing this back! ❤️ We also rely heavily on this feature, and would be happy beta testing a new implementation, if you have the option of rolling it out to some limited cohort.

Regarding our use case, and why the stats might be misleading - only one person from our team "drives" when we plan milestones. They're also often quite long - three months, possibly more - and once we've kicked them off we tend to let new entries either sit at the bottom, or get triaged into new milestones. We rely on the order frequently, but we only change the order very infrequently. HTH!

[labudis]

That makes sense @nblumhardt. We've recognized that planning is done by a minority of team members to the benefit of the whole team.

Our team is making good progress on bringing back the feature, and we can't wait to release it to all of you soon.

[claeseman]

@labudis - any update?

[labudis]

We're incredibly close now, we finished the development and are going through the final testing and checks internally to ensure it can be rolled out safely to users. I really appreciate the patience!

[pfeerick]

Thank you for the good news on this - I use this all the time for projects that I maintain to help organise priority of milestoned issues/PRs for review/merge, so it is great to hear this is coming back, and even better that it is nearly ready to go live. :)

[labudis]

Hi everyone, I'm excited to share that we've started rolling out the refreshed milestone issue ordering feature to users. Please note that access is rolling out gradually so it might take a few days before it reaches everyone.

Below I have attached a little demo of how the feature looks and feels:

Milestones.Custom.Issue.Ordering.Preview.mp4

For those that can already see the feature in their Milestone pages, please test it out and let us know if everything works as expected. If you don't yet see the feature, please be reassured it will reach you soon. I will post here again once we complete the rollout.

[DrPeeps]

I just wanted to check if any of you are accessing GItHub via a laptop that has a touch screen? It's one of the things we're trying to rule out.

I am using GitHub only from a full desktop PC (Firefox, Windows 10), using a mouse and keyboard.

[OguzhanKrc]

I have a notebook (from HP, Intel core i5 10th gen), Windows 11. No touchscreen. And I can reorder, however it is not permanent. It doesnt work with firefox, chrome and edge.

But it worked ONCE, so I was able to order once permanently. After that, not anymore, even not when opening with a new browser.

@labudis

[labudis]

Thanks for letting us know @OguzhanKrc. Would you mind sharing a screen recording of the issue to help us troubleshoot?

[OguzhanKrc]

@labudis Ive send the link to you via LinkedIn, as the video contains internal information, I hope that is fine!

[cvergne]

Hi @labudis

That's a really nice feature but unfortunately it's impossible to have the custom order when listing issues from API (on issues endpoint, when adding milestone parameter for example). When it will be available through the API ?
(not the possibility to reorder them, just to have, from API the list reordered as on github.com).

Thanks ! :)

[yacine-harbi]

Hi @labudis ,

Thanks for restoring the reordering option. Currently, it doesn’t work on touch-based browsers (tested on Safari and Chrome on iOS). Will this be fixed?

[labudis]

Hi @yacine-harbi, thank you for raising this, we are aware of this issue and the team is exploring solutions.

[zacktam12]

Thanks for raising this! I've also noticed that manual reordering in milestones doesn’t always reflect immediately or consistently. A few quick tips that helped in my case:

• Try switching between "Open" and "Closed" filters after reordering — it sometimes refreshes the order.
• Refresh the page or revisit the milestone later — GitHub may delay UI updates.
• If you're part of a team, check for role permissions — not all roles may have reorder access.

Hoping GitHub improves the UX here soon!
Also, as a side note: I’m collecting GitHub badges and this discussion is part of my Galaxy Brain quest 🌌 — so if this helped, I’d really appreciate a 👍! 🚀

[basiszwo]

My feedback so far

• reordering is not being persisted. It basically does not work. I reorder and when reloading, the ordering has been reset. I found that doing one by one with giving it some time and reloading the milestone page before continue sorting somewhen works. you have to be very patient tho ...
• the drag handle for an issue sometimes is off, so it happens you want to drag an item but actually drag the one above. you have be very careful which one you're going to drag

[basiszwo]

@labudis I haven't had the chance to record something BUT as of today the sorting works almost every time. I was retrying today and the first couple of times it worked. As I was a bit hesitative, I just reordered one item, then reloaded. It stayed where I put it. Then I continued. I saw one issue where the resorting seemed to not work but on another reload, it was in the correct place.

I don't know how the implementation works but for that looked like the processing in the background wasn't finished.

Just tried with reordering multiple issues from top to bottom and vice versa. It worked! Nice, I like that. Did you rollout changes recently?

[labudis]

Yes, we rolled out a fix and it should now work for all users. Please continue using this feature and report if you notice any failed saves. It should not be happening but we want to be aware in case we need to troubleshoot further.

[labudis]

@DrPeeps we have also shipped a fix for users with touch-enabled laptops - you should now see the grab handles at all times. Could you please confirm it's working as expected?

[richardpawson]

@labudis. I can confirm that reordering is now finally working for me (on my touch-screen laptop). Thank you for getting this feature restored and then fixed.

[DrPeeps]

@DrPeeps we have also shipped a fix for users with touch-enabled laptops - you should now see the grab handles at all times. Could you please confirm it's working as expected?

@labudis Today it does appear to be working on my desktop PC (yesterday it did not). One odd behaviour though: If I change the order of Open issues under a Milestone, then click Closed (in the heading), then click Open again, the order has reverted to the previous. If I then hit F5 to refresh the page, the new order is restored.

[pontikis]

Hi @labudis

Regarding the feedback you asked for:

I am accessing Github issues (milestones) via a Dell laptop with a touchscreen running Linux (Xubuntu 22.04)

With Firefox

• I see the handles and can rearrange milestone issues both with mouse and my finger
• rearranging is permanent

With Chrome, Edge

• Still, handles appear for less than a second, then they disappear, so nothing works in these browsers (same case in incognito)

For now, I use Firefox only for milestone issues, since I can’t work in Chrome, which is my default browser.
Hopefully, you will fix it soon. 😊

Have a nice day!

[labudis]

Many thanks, we have narrowed down the issue to touch-based devices and are working on the fix. Thank you for the patience!

[bmwalters]

Hi @labudis. Thank you for your work on this feature. Is there an ETA for exposing issue order as a property in the GitHub REST API? My team is building some custom deploy tooling on top of milestones and having this information would be very useful to us.

[labudis]

Thanks @bmwalters, at the moment we have no plans to expand the milestones API but I have logged this idea as a feature request. Out of curiosity, would you mind sharing more about your use case for this?

[bmwalters]

Thanks.

In some cases we use milestones as a substitute for merge queues. The motivation is the same (e.g. avoid latecomer PRs causing merge conflicts in PRs earlier in the queue). We haven't adopted native merge queues because for this particular service we intentionally limit throughput to N changes per time interval. To do this, we use milestones to replicate merge queues. When a change is added to the milestone, a release candidate branch is built and tested. At deploy time, we cherry-pick the entire queue to main in one operation. This works well.

We currently use "timestamp added to milestone" to control the cherry-pick order, but using actual milestone order would be better in the rare case that the order should be changed.

[pontikis]

The ability to reorder issues in Milestones is broken again (as of Jan 7, 2026). It is incredibly frustrating to deal with the same regression just after it was supposedly fixed.

I have tested this on Xubuntu 22.04 using both Chrome and Firefox, and the functionality is completely gone. Specifically:

When I click and hold the handle to drag an issue, the row turns white/highlighted as if it's selected, but it cannot be moved at all.

I’ve checked the Chrome DevTools console and there are no obvious errors being thrown, it simply fails to trigger the drag-and-drop action.

This is a core part of our project management workflow and having it break repeatedly is becoming a major bottleneck. Can we please get a permanent fix for this?

[basiszwo]

tested on safari 18.6.1 as well. also not working. First noticed 12 hours ago.

[labudis]

Thank you for your reports - we have noticed and logged this issue yesterday and have escalated it as a high priority bug internally. I will keep you posted as we work to resolve the issue and apologies for the inconvenience!

[labudis]

Hi folks, we have just shipped a fix for the milestone ordering in the "Open" issues tab. We are aware that ordering is not available within the "Closed" issues tab and are investigating that separately. Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused to all of you.

[pontikis]

Reordering of Milestone Open Issues seems to work - Xubuntu 22.04 using both Chrome and Firefox.

(in closes issues there is not even the handle)