I'd say this needs to happen upstream. Workboards are complex and a bit daunting to patch locally. I searched upstream and could not find an existing request (surprisingly.)

Also relevant: https://secure.phabricator.com/T10412#161719

"We could try "1, 2, 3", and if that produces the same task with other users complaining that they don't want to have to hide columns and that that order is unintuitive and that they're used to doing "3, 2, 1" on Trello we can just remove milestones entirely."

Thanks @Aklapper and @mmodell . Sounds like the Milestones behavior is intentional (which we assumed was the case) and that they are not yet considering free-reordering. Maybe an upstream task will help them reconsider. Now that the task is tagged with Upstream, should I make a ticket with them, or is that part of the Phabricator process?

@MBinder_WMF: Feel free to upstream after checking their requirements for root problems and use cases (I'd hope our docs also link to this, if not they welcome updating.)

Upstreamed: https://secure.phabricator.com/T11750

I checked the docs you linked, @Aklapper , and while they don't seem to link directly to the requirements for root problems and use cases, they do link to the Introduction to contributing to Phabricator, Arcanist and libphutil, a link which in turn links to the requirements. :)

TL;DR: If we want this, we have to fork and do it ourselves: https://secure.phabricator.com/T11036#197989

Here's what happened:

1. I commented in an existing ticket the need for this
2. Phacility told me, in a comment reply, to request the feature through standard Phacility channels
3. I made a feature request ticket
4. It was immediately merged as a dupe into an existing related but different-feature ticket
5. I reiterated the request as a comment in the ticket into which the other was merged, and was told this feature ain't happening without a fork.

FWIW, this is very easy to implement as a patch to our phabricator fork. There may be hidden consequences that I haven't considered but from what I can see it appears that it's straightforward and doesn't seem to have any obvious drawbacks or trade-offs.