Is this how Searching Members is supposed to work ?

Digital Doctor

Digital Doctor

Well-known member
upload_2013-10-15_18-33-33.webp


can't I search for: adam
and receive a list of people named adam ?
I keep being directed to Adam, not a list of all Adams.
 
All the usernames will have spaces and they're in alphabetical order. To bring up all "Adam _" if _ represents a blank space, would cause the script to poll the database and retrieve usernames that are "Adam _" from the username table. It's far too much work with everything else polling the database and would be part of bad design. You want to lessen the amount of requests, not increase them.
 
I guess Adam E through Z are screwed then ?

If the current functionality is kept, then I would display the 9 Adams with the most Posts, not the top 9 alphabetically.

OSS 117 said:
It's far too much work with everything else polling the database and would be part of bad design. You want to lessen the amount of requests, not increase them.
Click to expand...

Forum allow text searching of millions of entire posts. (lots of work)
Text Searching on Usernames (not lots of work).

My suggestion is ... display the first nine and have a "Page Down" option to display the next nine.
 
This is not even always working as shown in this thread. It is not always possible to find a name at all that is a subset of another name.

The correct behaviour works on your forums searching for dan -- dan is the first search result, despite there being a Dan007 and a Dan Allen, which also come up.
However, if you search for peggy, Peggy does not come up first in the list of dropdowns, and is missing altogether, in spite of her being shown as a Notable Member. The Peggy Ragland that is the only name that comes up is someone different.

On our own recently installed system, liz does not return Liz on a member seach, only LizzySomeone and another Lizlongername. On the member page, it's really hard to get to Liz even knowing that there is such a member.

Surely this is a bug.
 
Digital Doctor said:
Text Searching on Usernames (not lots of work).
My suggestion is ... display the first nine and have a "Page Down" option to display the next nine.
Click to expand...
Amaury said:
Just search Adam Z to narrow it down...
Click to expand...
I'm with Digital Doctor on this. On vBulletin, we had a member browse, so if we couldn't remember the name, we could look though what we thought we could remember. Now the search is all there is, but you refuse to give us more than 9 hits. If we could remember that the name was Adam Z, then sure, we'd so that search. Maybe you're too young to experience thinking it must have been a last name that begins with J and it turns out to be Z. You're saying, in effect, just do a search on every letter in the alphabet. That's what computers do. And I would guess more efficiently and using less resources than if we do 26 searches. And even so, if there are 12 Adam Msomethings, we would never ever see the last three even searching for Adam M.

I don't know how many members you have, but you don't have to return all the hits at once. The suggestion to provide a Page Down would limit the hits needing to be returned at one time.
 
Last edited:
Wendy Cutler said:
On our own recently installed system, liz does not return Liz on a member seach, only LizzySomeone and another Lizlongername. On the member page, it's really hard to get to Liz even knowing that there is such a member.

Surely this is a bug.
Click to expand...
There is more to the problem. On the members page, if I query, on our system, wangalex, nothing drops down to select. If I hit enter, his profile comes up. He did several postings, though not for several years. Still, why would the name not appear as a hit to be selected? I thought several people I wanted to find were no longer on our system until I learned to go ahead and hit enter to do the query anyway. Shouldn't an exact match come up as a hit to be selected on a search? When I start entering my username and get as far as the wc, my wcutler username comes up.
 
It's based on activity. If a member hasn't been active for six months, I think it is, they won't show up on the auto-complete.
 
Amaury said:
If a member hasn't been active for six months, I think it is, they won't show up on the auto-complete
Click to expand...
Thanks. That's helpful to know. Not so helpful for people doing the search, as they wouldn't know if the person they're searching has been active in the last six months (unless they get a hit and can look at that person's profile).
So that's the answer to both parts of my question. Notable Peggy doesn't show up on the selection list because, though she's notable, she hasn't been around since 2013.

It's a funny decision. The more recently a person has been around, the more likely one is to already know his/her user name. The longer it's been since one has seen that person's name, the more one needs the help of having the name pop up on the search.

Of course, if you're only going to show nine names no matter what, then you would make some decision about what you're not going to show. It's not very helpful for the person doing the search. It's like it was designed by someone who never wanted information from a search. When you're looking for information, you want the information. You don't assume that the system is just going to withhold some.
 
I'm not allowed to reply in the other thread. If you have a page called Members, and if that page has a search, unless you have something written on the page saying what the deal is, people doing a search will expect to find every instance that matches their search. We've all grown up on google now. We expect all 2 million hits. OR
State on the page that only people seen on the site in the past 6 months will be returned in the search, and only the first nine people at that.

It's like there's this secret - only the people who coded the site know that only people who have visited in the past 6 months will be returned as hits, and only the first nine. The rest of the users think they're getting a legitimate search as offered, which is "find me all the people who match my search criteria". That's what users expect when they do a search.
 

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