As far as I knew, before the Winter of our Missed Content, if you had your user id changed, a search on the new id would only turn up posts after the change because the old posts were still indexed under your old id (although they would display with the new id).
I read a recent post from a user saying this had changed. Sure enough, I tried searching on my old id and no posts were found. They were all under my new id.
Here’s my question: did the new version of vB fix this bug, or is this just a result of rebuilding the message board and recent id changes will result in the same search problem as before?
I think the index was probably rebuilt during the change. I also think that some old threads would get looked at and become indexed under the new name.
rowrrbazzle - I don’t quite understand your question, but if you do a search by userid then all posts will be found regardless of username, if you had an administrator change the username for you but kept the same “identity” / post count / etc… You can tell what kind of search is being done by looking at the link created by the vBulletin software. For example clicking on the “search” button below a user’s post does a search by userid (notice the “action=finduser&userid=NNN”).
On the other hand, if you do search by username, then of course you will only find posts where the member name is equal to the name you type in.
Or to be more clear - you, rowrrbazzle, used to post under a different name (of course I forget what it is right now, but it’ll come back to me.) When an administrator changed your username they updated your record in the database so you have a different username but the same userid.
On the other hand, if someone asked to “start over” with a new identity (which we don’t do very often) they would end up with a new userid and so a search by username or userid would only show posts for the new username/userid.
As Chronos pointed out, I confused “user id” and “username” in my OP. I should have said “username” in all cases.
Bingo. I had my username changed from zgystardst to rowrrbazzle back in July 2001.
After the change, when I would perform a search by going to the search page and typing “rowrrbazzle” in the field “Search By User Name”, no posts that I had made as zgystardst would be found.
This is not what happens now. Now, if I enter “rowrrbazzle” in “Search By User Name”, all of my posts turn up including those I made as zgystardst.
I was just curious as to what is causing the different search behavior.
a) Is it a change to the software which has eliminated this problem? (Maybe even prior to the hacking?)
or
b) Does it have something to do with rebuilding the message board, which means recent username changes will result in the same search anomaly that I encountered?