I did a little bit of digging on this and it is actually a search setting which WMF has deselected (presumably for performance). I turned it on on staging and didn't notice it being particularly worse for it - so it might be valid to turn it off - but I guess it's about managing that change (timing - quick back-out if there is an issue - potentially testing more on staging).

It is an easy 'flick of the button' so it could be done at the start of an SF day with people knowing about it & knowing how to switch back if there is a whisper of a problem (preferably documenting it very well if they do for future debug). I suggest this option knowing that there is only so much testing you can do on staging.

The setting is on this page civicrm/admin/setting/search?reset=1. Note that we or the settings on that page the top 2 are the ones where I have a reasonably clear picture of how they affect search performance (they are the ones most likely to hurt search speed)

This sort functionality would be great to have switched on for Donor Services. Searching for donors with non-unique names is something we do plenty of, and the ability to isolate things like city or country from a list of the same names would save us a lot of time going back to donors for more information. I'd recommend upping this to at least normal priority - we should fix this if it doesn't break/impede anything else.

So this is actually just a thing we can turn on in the UI and turn off again if it causes problems. So I guess the main thing is just to do it at a time when any issues can be responded to.

I guess we just call a time & let people know. I can send around an email

thank you!

Per emails I changed this setting - seems ok to me...

This is working for me too, and I haven't noticed any issues - thanks.