Not a bug Users > Search for Users > Search by IP address / No "Show All Matches" and "Batch Update"

[Steve Gibson]

Affected version

2.2.6

When Users > Search for Users > Standard Search returns a set of matches, it's possible to “select all” and perform a Batch Update.

But the seemingly symmetrical operation of ... > Search by IP address returns a set of matches, but it's not possible to “select all” and perform a Batch Update on the set of users returned by the search.

It seems as though either search mode should take us to the same results page, where we can perform a batch operation on the results??

Thanks!

 

[Chris D]

Unfortunately while the operations may seem symmetrical, what is happening behind the scenes is rather different, and the interface to "Show all matches" and then "Batch update" are intrinsically tied to the workings of the "Search for users" tab whereas the "Search by IP address" does a completely different type of search.

If they were indeed symmetrical, we wouldn't have a separate tab at all and there'd just be an "IP address" field to search for.

Aside from all of that, performing bulk actions based on IP address is really quite ill-advised. While in some cases it may be clear that some users sharing an IP address may be the same person and performing some sort of bulk action might be relevant, there is a diminishing chance that is the case as companies like Apple start focusing on proxying internet traffic for privacy reasons to hide IP addresses.

With all that being said there might be a way we'd be able to add this functionality in the future, though it would need to be done in a different way to how it works for the normal search users page.

At this point, that'd be more of a suggestion that we may consider for the future though rather than a bug fix.

 

[Steve Gibson]

If they were indeed symmetrical, we wouldn't have a separate tab at all and there'd just be an "IP address" field to search for.

Ah, good point! <g> Thanks very much for taking the time to reply, Chris!