Is there a way to remove a specific user’s posts from the search results? Currently, if a highly active user has a username that starts with or otherwise includes a popular term in a community such as…
Search term: ‘ABCD’
Username: ‘ABCDAndUser…’
…Searching said term often brings up a list of the username’s posts, to the point where it can be near impossible to differentiate results of that user’s random posts from ones that are actually on-topic and simply include that user in the discussion. Ideally, most members would desire a list of on-topic posts over ones that only include said user posting without the term in active use.
Edit: Currently I’m not aware of a workaround for this other than changing said username and/or users blocking said username while conducting their search. Neither of these are ideal.
It does seem like there must be some possible enhancement there — it doesn’t seem right that a name can “hijack” a search like that, and it seems likely that people might pick usernames related to any given forum’s particular topic.
I don’t know how hard this would be under the hood, but it might be good to surpress usernames unless the @ is there.
I don’t think that’s the best solution for this problem. For example, I can imagine on a car forum someone having a username proclaiming that they own or love some car model. Would you really want ban that possibility — or maintain the list?
Also, once I had to ask a support question of AT&T, and I was unable to use the name “Matthew”. Want to guess why?
Maybe I misunderstand the setting as stated. Would you have to reserve every instance of any potentially problematic word in future usernames and retroactively remove it from community members’ usernames as well?
I know for a fact we have members that use the name ‘testuser’ for instance. I.E this only would work as a solution if we used wildcards to ban usernames en masse, no? That seems like it could easily become overbearing across numerous abbreviations (this particular instance was an ETF ticker in a finance community).
Also as a practical matter, the username restriction does not work well with SSO. With that, if the SSO does not enforce the same restriction and the user unwittingly chooses a “banned” name, Discourse will assign them a random long uuid-like username.
Is there a specific reason Discourse doesn’t mimic the Google minus sign to exclude search results containing a term (or in this case a username as a term to exclude) from a search? I think that would have been the simplest workaround if it existed.
This is technically possible in our current index, but would require a bunch of work to get it going. Especially since msft_user gets tokenized down to two tokens (msft / user) so we would need to use the is followed by syntax. I can see the merit of implementing a - operator but it is not a trivial change.
Yes, apologies if this got too long in the tooth. That was certainly not my intention.
I figured I would ask after one of our members brought up this situation, since it seemed like a fitting change when your team was just recently working on improvements to the search.
No problems at all, I think it is a perfectly legitimate request, supporting -something and -"some longer phrase" could be quite useful in all sorts of cases.
It is not a trivial change, but also it is not an enormous piece of work, the main thing about this change is that it is a bit fiddly.
I am tagging this and next round of work on search we can revisit!
