Can no longer search list of users except by user name?
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I may be misremembering since I can no longer find an old site where this “works”. But I thought I used to be able to search the user list by “real name” or email address, not just user name.
Obviously, this isn’t a big deal for this particular site where there are only a handful of users, but is it true that the only the user name field is checked in the search? For site with a large number of users, I’d like to be able to search by the other fields in the user list.
Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Thanks, but search by email doesn’t work for me. Tried, for example, “gmail”. Unless the string appears in a user name, the search doesn’t return anything.
I realize that the real name and email address aren’t stored in the user table, but it would still be helpful to have a more complete search that checks the Name and E-mail fields that displayed on the “All Users” page. Maybe this is a feature request?
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Are you referring to the “Search Users” tool at the Users page, found at dashboard > Users > All Users?
In one website I have two Administrators. Each has an email address beginning with the letter “m.” The user search picked the correct email address when I entered into the “Search Users” field the first two letters of an eighteen character email address.
I realize that the real name and email address aren’t stored in the user table…
What is the “user table,” and where is it found?
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The user search picked the correct email address when I entered into the “Search Users” field the first two letters of an eighteen character email address.
Sorry. I was mistaken. The two-letter search was only successful when the first two letters of the email address were also the first letters of the site owner’s username.
Searching for the entire email address, however, picks the correct user.
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…it would still be helpful to have a more complete search that checks the Name and E-mail fields that displayed on the “All Users” page. Maybe this is a feature request?
It may be better to submit feature requests to the Ideas forum.
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Thanks so much for checking on this. You’re right. Entering the full email address does find the user (and yes, it’s the “Search Users” box on the dashboard page Users > All Users
My comment about the “users” table was in the context of the wordpress.org sites I support where I have access to the underlying MySQL database used by WordPress. I misspoke above – the email address *is* in the user table (but the first name and last name are associated with the user record but stored in a different table).
So you’ve confirmed (and I’ve verified) that the search does “work” if the entire email address is entered as the search term. However, in most search contexts, entering a substring (e.g. “gmail” to find “(email visible only to moderators and staff)”) is what would be expected. [That’s the way it works when searching on the user name field: entering “smith” will find both “marysmith” and “joesmith” user names.]
You may be right that search on “real name” never worked (and so that’s a feature request). But the odd restriction on having to search on the entire email address seems to be a bug. Anyway to flag this conversation for the happiness engineers?
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My comment about the “users” table was in the context of the wordpress.org sites I support where I have access to the underlying MySQL…
Understood. Thanks.
So you’ve confirmed (and I’ve verified) that the search does “work” if the entire email address is entered as the search term.
Got it.
However, in most search contexts, entering a substring (e.g. “gmail” to find “[email redacted]”) is what would be expected.
Understood. I omitted noting that my attempts to search by parts of the email address, e.g. “gmail” or the part before the @ symbol, failed. I agree that this would be a helpful way to filter users should there be a lot of them.
You may be right that search on “real name” never worked (and so that’s a feature request).
That was rather a guess. I hadn’t ever tried a search at Users before the recent tests prompted by your topic. In my test case, there are only two users, and, for some unknown reason, only one real name in the Users list.
Anyway to flag this conversation for the happiness engineers?
Yes. Add a “modlook” tag to the sidebar here to call for staff attention.
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Hi Nancy.
You can use a wildcard in order to bring up results for partial search terms. For example, *@gmail.com will return a list of all of your users who have a gmail email address associated with them.
It used to be possible to do this without wildcards, however, this requirement was introduced due to benefits on performance.
Hope that helps out! Please do let me know if you have extra questions.
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Hmmm… My experiments show that the wildcard isn’t necessary, but if searching the email field, the “@” sign *is* required. The wildcard, if included in the email address field, seems to be ignored (i.e. it doesn’t hurt things, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient find a user where the email address matches the string).
e.g.
*gmail.com -> returns nothing (wild card character doesn’t help)
@gmail -> returns users with gmail addresses (wild card character not needed)
master@ -> returns user with “(email visible only to moderators and staff)” as the email address.Still don’t see any way to search on the real Name field. I’d be willing to use a similar token – e.g. “~smith” to find the users with the Name field containing the string “smith”.
And it would be helpful to have the @ sign be a token to request a search of the email address, not a character that must be put in a specific place in the search string. [Sometimes we don’t know the end of the email address or the beginning of the domain name.] For instance
@mary -> could return
(email visible only to moderators and staff)
(email visible only to moderators and staff)and not just
(email visible only to moderators and staff)
Thanks for listening. I realize the request is pretty wonky.
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Redacted addresses:
webmaster <at> somedomain.com
marysmith <at> somedomain.com
maryjones <at> otherdomain.comsomeuser <at> mary …
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There has never been a means of searching by personal names here. The WordPress.com search engine indexes post, pages, and comments content (body text). Unless entered as text in those contents, blog name, post titles, and post/comment author names are not indexed. http://en.support.wordpress.com/wordpresscom-search/
Note that many of us do not wish to be identified online, so we use a pseudonym for a username, and a throwaway email address for our blogging, and we reserve our personal email address for family and close friend use only.
Granted that I can identified if one wants to do that but if any blogger does snoop around and then refers to me by my actual name online, rather than my pseudonym then our blogging relationships is over. I will unfollow their blog so fast their head will spin, and I will remove every link back to their blog from mine including all approved comments.
Why do you think you need to know actual names?
What use do you intend to make of actual names?
Normally only those who intend to mass email (spam) others with email they did not request to receive are on this bent. Thankfully, there is no mass mailing feature here at WordPress.com. Your followers can subscribe to receive your posts by email under whatever username and email address they wish to use and they alone can control the frequency of receipt of your posts.
IMPORTANT: When followers or commenters provide an email address for a specific purpose you cannot use it for any other purpose. In fact doing that in Canada is against the law.
If you intend to harvest visitor email addresses for any purpose then you can create a Subscribe page and clearly state on it that you intend to do. http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/
You can add and customize a contact form with multiple fields, change the email address where you’ll be notified, and mark feedbacks as spam from your dashboard on that page. http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact-form/
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@timetheif
I am talking about the “Search Users” box on the admin page where users are listed. That page displays Username, Name, Email, Role and #posts. It is possible to click links at the top of that page to get the users in different roles. So when I see the “Search Users” box I assume that it is a text search on the other fields that the page displays.Granted this isn’t something that’s needed all the time — but there is a way (noted above) to coerce the search to look at the email field.
As an example, consider a site with several pages of users, and one of them leaves the community. Perhaps the admin doesn’t remember the user name or the email address, but wants to find the user in the list to check to see if any posts need to be reassigned and then delete or change the privileges. Yes, on WordPress.com the “Name” field might not be helpful, but in many cases it would save the administrator some time to be able to search on it.
My WordPress sites (both .com and .org) are mostly in support of well defined communities where access to the members’ contact information is covered by organizational policies and outside of the WordPress context. Most of them actually discourage comments and registrations without invitation, so we obviously live in different worlds.
@staff
Maybe a little “Info” icon next to that “Search Users” box to explain its limitations — and the tip about searching by email — would be helpful. Just a suggestion. -
@nes49: You’re right that it’s not possible to search by first and last name on that page in WP Admin, only by username or email. If you think that expanding the search to the name field would be useful, I encourage you to register it as an idea in the WordPress.org ideas forums:
For your sites that are running on WordPress.org, you could also consider a plugin to achieve what you’re after:
I didn’t realise that searching for @gmail.com no longer required a wildcard, and so thank you for letting me know about that! Doing a little digging, I found that the requirement for wildcards was recently under discussion on the WordPress project, so it’s likely this discussion that brought about the change.
At the moment, it’s possible to use partial search terms for usernames, without a wildcard, and for email addresses starting with an @ symbol within WP Admin on WordPress.com. Any changes to this would need to go through the core WordPress project over on WordPress.org. If you’re interested in raising this over there, then the Ideas forums that I linked to above will be a good place to get started.
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Thanks for the link to the plugin, and I see why the feature might be considered “plugin territory” (though the one you pointed out may not be being maintained).
Anyway, at this point, I think just better documentation on what the search box actually searches would be helpful (though I realize documentation on something like that would probably be rarely consulted even if getting “no results found” on likely search terms is frustrating). For myself, on my .org sites if I had a problem, I’d tend to go straight to the database — or write my own simple shortcode to do the search.
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Hi Nancy.
I’ll make a note to create some documentation around this, thanks for your feedback. :)
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