Try this?

ok misarable stardock company let me explain the situation clearly,this problem reported many years but u still did not fix the problem when we talk about disable auto arrange we talk about freedom to put icons where we want but even we disable auto arrange option still we cant  put icons like we do in windows ,try that when u took that icon to there the rest of icons starts to move by themselves and they auto arranging nothing can stop this there is no option for this al this time ppl complaining about this we can not have control icons whatever we do they start to move when we had a crowded desktop and when we move 1 icon our all design gets f.cked up cuz of this

Reply #1, January 2011.

The 'corralling' of icons within a fence and their subsequent need to relocate as and when fence boundaries are moved means there is always going to be a 'shuffle' of icons to re-fit into the new fence shape/size.

The closest you will get to absolute positioning is to maintain a standard and static GUI, both in function and resolution.

If icons maintain an absolute position relative to the desktop resolution they will become hidden when one of two things happens.

1. resizing your desktop resolution,

or

2. resizing of Fences - hence it is not an appropriate option.

You can arrange the icons in your Fence. They will however align to a grid inside the Fence.

I see I'm not alone in my frustration.

A victim of simply buying Fences outright, based on someone's recommendation, instead of trying the 30-day trial first, so I'm at least glad it was only $10.

The reason I bought Fences is because I RDP to my computer a lot and I hate my desktop icons always rearranging. I was told by someone that Fences stops that from happening.

I haven't even tested that functionality yet because I stumbled across this forum while researching on my frustration about the forced icon arrangment and was hoping there was a fix.

Like everyone else in this thread complaining, this is absolutely ludicrous. I can create a fence but I can't arrange my own icons inside the fence however I want? That's like buying a house but the Realtor gets to dictate how I arrange my furniture.

I want to arrange my icons in an order of MY choosing so you guys really ought to consider changing this behavior of the app. It appears this is almost universally hated by everyone who tries the app.

Has there been any updates to this issue?

Just stumbled upon this thread.

This is actually a big issue IMHO. Ever since Win98, I've disabled "auto arrange" and "align to grid". This way, I can position an icon at a specific location. The idea of organizing icons into "fences" is pretty great (I've been using the product for 1 year), but today I decided to disable it.

We have here an incongruity; a product that is designed specifically for users that want to tinker deep into desktop customization, with things like automatic sorting and saving icon positions, but lacking a basic feature like disabling auto-arrange.

The entire mental purpose of Fences is to make muscle memory more efficient since icons are located at fixed points. Not having an option to "place" an icon at a specific location inside a fence, is something unacceptable because this is a function available in stock Windows icon management, and one that many, many users use to put an icon slightly "off center" as a reminder. If this was a gripe for any other software, it could be considered petty, but given that this entire product's purpose is to manage icons, the lack of this option , at least in some beta offering, is unacceptable.

thanks!

Hi. Sorry this is a bit late, but this worked for me

Create a temporary folder

"Cut" the items from your Fence, and "paste" into the temp folder

Now, one by one, "cut" the items from your temp folder and "paste" them back into the Fence, in the order you want them in

This worked for me using Fences 1

Itoo find it EXTREMELY disappointing that one cannot arrange the icons in the "fences" in the order-position desired ...

this is extremely disappointing and makes me hate colorless customizing windows 10 even more ...

WILL YOU EVER ALLOW USER THE FREEDOM they deserve???? 

Quoting milenakukova,

reply 43

Hi... I specifically registered here just to say that...its 2019 and this still hasn't been addressed. It's been 9 years since the first post! I can't believe that any software developer will not listed to their customers on something so simple. Nobody wants to arrange their icons based on name, date, or whatever someone thought it's a good solution. It also doesn't allow me to arrange my desktop icons the way I want them. Unbelievable. It becomes so annoying to the point of getting rid of it, and just use folders to place all my stuff.  I work in the consumer research area and I haven't seen such ignorance to customers complains, especially in the own company's forum.   

Which means, they are probably NOT going to address it. I didn't even get a reply to my thorough explanation in April of 2017.

Quoting mybeachpaint,

reply 44

Quoting milenakukova,

reply 43

Hi... I specifically registered here just to say that...its 2019 and this still hasn't been addressed. It's been 9 years since the first post! I can't believe that any software developer will not listed to their customers on something so simple. Nobody wants to arrange their icons based on name, date, or whatever someone thought it's a good solution. It also doesn't allow me to arrange my desktop icons the way I want them. Unbelievable. It becomes so annoying to the point of getting rid of it, and just use folders to place all my stuff.  I work in the consumer research area and I haven't seen such ignorance to customers complains, especially in the own company's forum.   

Which means, they are probably NOT going to address it. I didn't even get a reply to my thorough explanation in April of 2017.

Well its now 2021 and this is still not implemented in Fences 3.x - so I have to agree with you.

In response to RedneckDude's comment above - I agree that a response was made but not that it is the only way to do what is requested. Fences already provides a vertical scroll bar for those times when there are too many entries to fit within the defined fence boundary.

I would have thought it possible therefore to provide a positioning grid with respect to the top left corner of the fence, and implement a vertical and horizontal scroll bar if the users chosen location falls outside of the fences boundaries - whether these are altered by either resizing the fence or the screen resolution.

To be fair I don't know how this has been coded, so don't know if the application has a mechanism for maintaining data regarding each icon - but it obviously retains some data as it uses this for doing the fence sorts.

Anyway I had taken the Trial route and determined this problem pretty quickly - which is a shame as I also want to have position control.

Just have to keep looking for alternative solutions.

I've been using Fences 3 for a number of years now, and I've always found it a little annoying at times. I have a fence with shortcuts for games I have installed, and I would so so so much love that when I uninstall a game, and the shortcut gets deleted, and it just left a gap where the icon used to be rather than rearranging all of them. You get used to things being in a certain spot, and when things shift, it throws you off so much. Would be much better to have an option you can use to automatically fill gaps/rearrange the icons if you wanted to.
I totally understand them rearranging if the size of the fence is changed, but so long as the width isn't changed, there's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to have static icon placement within a fence.