Users of Patent Center are familiar with the Patent Center Tickets web site. It lists bugs in Patent Center, and it lists Patent Center feature requests, and it has a special section entitled Good things about Patent Center. I am delighted to report that the USPTO has fixed one of the bugs in Patent Center!
Yes, on about September 24, 2025, the USPTO fixed Trouble Ticket CP212.
This trouble ticket CP212 was reported to the USPTO on March 20, 2025, The trouble ticket describes a bug identified by alert listserv member Krista Jacobsen:
Until a few days ago, Patent Center’s workbench display of patent applications could be sorted (among other things) by the status date in descending order. (Indeed it seems that this ought to be the default sort order.) And then when the user would return from viewing a particular application, the sort order would be preserved for the rest of the user session. But within the past few days, the USPTO developers broke this function. Now when the user returns from viewing a particular application, the sort order is discarded and the applications are sorted by a (useless) sort order that lists PCT applications first.
This bug fix by the USPTO was noted by alert listserv member Alan Taboada on September 24, 2025. His subject line was Applications View Sort Stickiness Issue Seems to be Fixed, and he wrote:
In a small bit of good news relating to Patent Center, it appears that the issue of maintaining desired sort order when viewing applications in the workbench has been fixed.
This was a real pain when viewing applications sorted, for example, by status date or anything other than what the default sort was in Patent Center.
Hopefully it will remain fixed.
This bug fix by the USPTO permits us to move Trouble Ticket CP212 from the “open issues” section to the “resolved issues” section of the trouble ticket page.
(Users of Patent Center who have not already done so should join the Patent Center listserv, an email discussion group for users of Patent Center.)
This happy bit of news about Patent Center prompts me to hope that soon the USPTO will fix the other hundred or so outstanding trouble tickets in Patent Center. Some of the bugs date from as long ago as April of 2020.
This happy bit of news about Patent Center also prompts me to hope that soon the USPTO will implement the fifty or so outstanding feature requests, some of which date from as long ago as April of 2020. (As of right now, USPTO has not implemented any of the feature requests.)