I am still adjusting to the new search, so if I’m just missing something please let me know.
With the old search, when you opened the search input while viewing a category, tag, or topic it would show a checkbox giving you the option to limit the search to the current category/tag/topic or make it a global search.
The new version doesn’t show this until you actually type something, but otherwise achieves the same goal.
The problem is, if what you are searching for is posts by a given user within that context, it doesn’t give you the option to search within the category/tag/topic. It just shows possible matching usernames to execute a global search for those users.
Even if I type in my full username, it still only gives me the option to search globally.
To me, this is a pretty significant loss of functionality. Sometimes I’m looking for an old post of mine in a specific topic. The easiest way to do this before was to navigate to that topic and then search by my username.
Now, as I’m looking more closely, I see that technically I can achieve the same thing by clicking the search in this topic button first, but this is unintuitive. After you’ve typed something, that option (with the text preceding it) actually executes the search, while here is just adds the topic id to the search box.
So regardless of the fact that I can apparently get what I want, it still seems odd to me that only searching by username would be limited in how you can execute a search filtered by the current category/tag/topic. Would it be possible to make this work the same as searching for text, where it gives you two options: Search within category/tag/topic and search globally? Even if this was limited to when you typed in an exact username, I think it would be a huge improvement.
For a quick mockup, this is what I would want to see:
