I’ve finally discovered a little quirk in the search function that I was totally unaware of. Every now and then because the curser is right on the left edge of the “search by user name” box, I’ll move it over a notch so I can clearly see it. Totally unneccessary I know. However I’ve now established that if you do that, the search program will not recognize the user name and you get the “invalid” message. Heretofore I had thought it was just a program gliche as a result of hampsters. If you’ve had the same problem as me, now you know.
Er… why would that work? The space is a valid character in SDMB usernames, so the search engine can’t just ignore them.
Doing a ‘match partial name’ search on " beer" will find the poster Gin and Beer It!, whereas searching for just “beer”, without the preceding space, will find UncleBeer.
The same is true of others; " blue" is to Mr. Blue Sky and Wicked Blue as “blue” is to bluethree and Blueapple (and Mr. Blue Sky and Wicked Blue, of course).
Wickit, I always use the “match exact name” option. Try a vanity search with that option, and tap the space bar once before typing in your user name.
Yes, it shows nothing, which was my point: as far as the search is concerned, the space character is just as valid as, say, the letter P. One should not expect it to ignore the space in a search any more than the letter P.
Pwikkit
That’s not a quirk. You’ve just told it to search for the poster " grienspace". Of course it isn’t going to find you.
If you’re doing a vanity search (which I assume in this context means a search to see if anyone has mentioned you, rather than a review of your own postings), you’d put your username into the ‘Search By Keyword’ field, wouldn’t you?
- Although in this case searching for my user name with a preceding space doesn’t appear to make any difference - it finds instances of “Hey,[space]Mangetout, you are a complete and total…” and quoted blocks headed with “Originally Spouted By[space]Mangetout”, along with posts that begin “Mangetout: you’re just a…” (which don’t appear to have a preceding space in the post).