The current search feature seems to only include the name of the user when returning results.
It would be nice is it also looked at the “About me” section.
This way, you can search for people based on their interests or skills, etc.
2 Likes
I do not feel this is a good idea – it would add a lot of noise to search results. Matching on username is one thing, matching on the whole of about me… noise.
4 Likes
From a Moderator’s point of view, being able search profiles would be a big plus at being able to find duplicate accounts.
But from a typical user’s point of view I think being able to search custom fields would make more sense.
6 Likes
I’m torn on this. As it would make suspect accounts more public and I don’t like that.
2 Likes
On top of that you can enter any kind of gibberish or nonsense on your profile and that is ok. But having it pollute search is not.
2 Likes
I agree with @codinghorror but also understand the impulse. It would be nice to be able to provide users with fields they can complete so they can find their way to each other, for example to list tags of areas of expertise, languages spoken, what they are looking for etc. Maybe the custom fields could optionally be searchable?
But then again discourse is a forum and not a social network, and if it does its job people will find their way to each other through their discussions.
4 Likes
After playing around with AD SSO and sending some useful information like employee titles and departments as custom fields into Discourse, the ability to search custom fields to find users would be very welcome!
Something like this, leaving it up to the site admin how to set it up:
(although maybe it would be better implemented as a new Field Type “Searchable Text Field”)
6 Likes
if someone wanted to do this optionally on their forum as an extension, i’m assuming it would require a plugin. Where would someone start if they wanted to look into developing this type of functionality?
edit
Some other literature on the subject, i forgot i had seen this before but looks like someone had done some development on it, but ended up being decided against in core
is it possible to have the functionality in the linked PR in a plugin?
3 Likes