I wonder what’s different about your set-up. Because I’ve tried that at least half a dozen times, probably more like a dozen times, and it’s never once autocompleted to anything useful.
In fact, even if I type in the full name, exactly right, it usually doesn’t recognize that as a valid name until I hit enter. I’ll be looking at a little box that says “no matches” (or something like that.) But when I hit enter anyway, it generally figures it out and works–if (and only if) I have typed the full name exactly correctly.
This is not what happened. No one complained that things weren’t the same as vBulletin. People pointed out things that were an issue, and explained exactly why they were an issue. And they did so because he had not only explicitly asked us to, but made a big deal about how we had the ear of the guy who makes the software.
The problem was that he seemed ill prepared to actually take on that role. He started getting angry at people asking him to fix things that an admin could fix. And he acted like were were bad because not everyone had read his previous explanations. And he got angry when people voiced their own frustration at him–something that will obviously happen when something seems broken.
And, as I explained in the thread about him leaving, he didn’t exactly have a blank slate here. People were still upset at his previous actions where he was seemingly disrespectful to the board. I continue to point out that he used us as the bad Brand X example in his advertising, and even came here to tell us about it. That will get you some bad blood.
It is incorrect to try and turn the blame all on the posters who were reporting problems to him. Nothing that happened is any different than what happens when reporting bugs. People will report bugs that have already been reported, bugs the developers don’t agree with, and bugs that are just options that an admin could fix. They will be frustrated. They will get tired of being told that nothing can be done. And they will remember past conflicts.
He just took on something that was more than he could handle, and so he left. He told us that, if we wanted to report bugs, we could do so in the forum he had set up for that, which is what we should do.
None of that is our fault. And it was not a flounce, as that would imply he was wrong. At most, he could have tried actually telling us to stop reporting bugs to him or creating a thread to check before pointing out anything.
Finally, I reported the @ sign search issue while he was here. So I do not agree with your assumption he would have helped us fix it even if he were here.
Even now, if I type @pu, @puzzlegirl does not show up in the list. Even though she’s in this thread and is an active poster (and a mod), I only get posters I’ve never heard of: Punkin, Punchcrab, and koenigSIGG.
I get the same results typing pu into the Advanced search. I cannot find puzzlegirl. And her name doens’t have any _ in it.
I do think that it may be a munged username database from the conversion. If the spaces are still there in any part of it, but the software assumes usernames will never have spaces, that could be an issue.
But even if so, I think a proper priority system that prioritizes first posters in the thread (if any) and then posters who have been active would make more sense and be far more useful. And I don’t think that exists, and I doubt it ever will.
You get a feel for which type of devs a project has–the kind that listens to feedback and tried to keep improving their product, and the kind that is very reluctant to change. Discourse has the latter.
I find it a wee confusing, and one thing I don’t like is that it seems like you can’t choose whether you want to view the results in threads or posts (which is a real pain in the butt!) I’ll probably get the hang of it eventually, I suppose.
Also, if I want to look up something on the page itself, I can’t just do “CTRL F”, because then it opens the search engine automatically.
But do you have any luck if you just type in “puzzl”? Because vbulletin would have responded to that by giving you a list of names beginning with those letters, and it would include every name beginning with those letters, in alphabetical order. And you would easily have found me, even if you didn’t recall whether my name was “puzzlegal” or “puzzlegirl”. Whereas in this system, if you don’t recall my name EXACTLY right, you have no hope of finding me.
I think I see the pattern. It doesn’t seem to seach well until you reach either the end of the name, or an _.
You’re right, BigT - typing Puzzlegal doesn’t give me an option until i reach the end of the name, then, it autofills. Same with BigT.
But if it’s a name with an underscore, it fills in as soon as I hit the underscore. So when I type “Qadgop” it says nothing found. When I type “Qadgop_” it fills in “Qadgop_the_Mercotan”. Same with “Elendil” - nothing found. “Elendil_” it fills in “Elendil_s_Heir”.
Same when I’m trying to find one of my own posts: “Northern” doesn’t bring up my name. “Northern_” does bring it up.
Okay. So it’s broken for you, too. I’m really bad with names, so any search function that requires me to type a complete name, exactly correctly, before it finds anything useful is essentially worthless to me. I grant it might be useful for other people. But whatever added functionality you might have found is completely negated for me because i can’t even do a basic, simple search any longer.
Remember that in Discourse with “infinite scroll” there is no such thing as “on the page itself”. The thread is umpteen thousand posts long. Some of the posts near where you’re reading are in the browser and could be found with the browser’s Ctrl-F find function. But most of the posts, unless the thread is tiny, are not in the browser to be found. Instead they’re still on the server and will be loaded as needed when you scroll there (or goto them by post #) to read them.
The reason Discourse traps the Ctrl-F and pops up its search feature is that it’s search feature searches all the posts on the server, not just the few in the browser. So if you’re trying to find something that somebody said somewhere in the thread, browser find is the wrong way that will probably fail, and Discourse in-thread search is the right way.
Agree w folks upthread that there is something specifically broken about @puzzlegal’s username. The partial completion stuff works on my name, on some names, but not on others. And there’s nothing obvious like the presence or absence of underscores, punctuation, etc. to explain who’s treated right and who’s treated wrong.
It’s not just mine. I’ve searched for at least half a dozen names, and it hasn’t worked for a single one. There may be a few names it works for, but I’m guessing they are in the minority, given my experience.
Yes, you are far from the only one. It’s just an unhappy coincidence that it’s broke for searching for you while this thread has recently been about your (completely legitimate) challenges in searching for others by correct name much less by partial name.
I wouldn’t say it’s broken for me. It works for me most of the time; it seems to be specific examples it has trouble with, like your name. It worked when I put in “LSL” just now, and gave me @LSLGuy .
I wonder if it’s related to the glitch that makes Discobot ignore @Tripler .
Yeah, that one kind of bugs me too. It appears to be always displaying results as posts, but it’s really showing threads. If a search term appears multiple times in a thread, it’s showing you only one representative post from that thread. For example, if you search “quatloos,” sorted by relevance, the first result is post #24 from the recent “Betting with Quatloos” ATMB thread. You have to do a second search on that thread to see the many posts in it which contain that word.
I can see the rationale for doing it this way, because it reduces clutter in the search results, but—like a lot of things in Discourse—it’s not immediately apparent what’s going on, and you have to poke around and experiment to figure it out.
Yes, but I remember having to poke around in vBulletin and figure out what was going on, especially after major upgrades. That’s the nature of software and the web.
Maybe you’re on to something: I tried to @Tripler and it wouldn’t autocomplete. @puzzlegal and everyone whose name can’t autocomplete, does Discobot respond to you? @Discobot fortune