eviapollack has a nasty looking attachment to their profile...

Thanks, I got rid of it.

I got funny behavior for "search by name" in the Memberlist.
It found a deleted member (I think) WHILE I was editing the name search box in Memberlist.
But it properly did NOT find that name whe4n I copy-pasted the entire, correct name into the search box.

I only mention it in case it brings to light some unintended behavior. It's not inconvenient to me at all.
If my guess about the root cause is close, it might never matter to anyone much at all.

First I copy-pasted "Eviapollack" into the "search by name" box in the Memberlist.
Not found - which I think is correct. The above thread suggests she was purged on Oct 22 2016.

To get around misspellings, I started deleting letters from the end, and when I got to just "Evia", it found two names: "Eviapollack" and "eviaann15".

When I clicked on "Eviapollack" , it silently returned me to the Memberlist Search page. It was not going to "Eviapollack" 's profile. (And I think that profile is no longer findable.)

My current guess is that "Eviapollack" was removed from the Memeberlist, but that the partial-name-search, or the "search-while-the-user-is-editing-the-name" feature is somehow still looking at a list of members from which "Eviapollack" was not yet purged. Even though Oct 22 to Nov 16 is around 24 days. And even though "Eviap" was never found.

Is there a difference between a 4-letter-search and a 5-letter-search? When I delete the 5th letter "p", two people are found within a second or so.

The fact that ANYTHING found a name that "no longer exists" hints that some data is hanging around longer than intended, or some search feature is looking in funny places.

Or my first guess was wrong. But it seemed odd that a "whole-name-search" after a copy-paste found different things than a partial-name-search.

When a username gets banned, they actually don't get deleted from our database. Rather, their account remains but goes into a "Banned" status which means they can't login. It's a long story why I do it that way.

The memberlist has a bug in that it is searching for ALL users, including banned ones. So searching for a banned person in the list will bring them up in the list, but when you click on it you get the "error" and it sends you back to the member list front page.

I'll get this bug fixed so that banned names no longer show up in that list.

I don't know, if someone was searching for someone they didn't know was banned, at least "here they are ... no they aren't" let's the searcher know that they typed the name right, but "something is amiss".

Mainly, I was intrigued that the name was NOT displayed when copy-pasted in its entirety, but WAS displayed once edited down to just the first few letters.

On reflection, maybe finding the other "Evia" was what evaded some "banned-name-blocker" and let me see both "Eviapollack" and "eviaann15".

Anyway, as long as you're confident this report is not a symptom of something with other unwanted effects, I would say the urgency level is 'way down there in the weeds. No big.

(As long as someone else, not me, is maintaining the system, I rather like it when things get so complex that the behavior becomes more like a person than a machine, with subtleties of behavior that make you think about what's under the hood.)

Thanks for letting me know!

I think the copy-paste didn't work because the script actually works on keystrokes. It is waiting for your keyboard to register a "key up" event before it goes off and does a search based on what you typed in. So copying into that field will not trigger the dropdown searcher.

HA! Thanks!

Oh, you speedboat! Did you ALREADY go and fix that?? I see that I no longer see "Eviapollack" when I edit down to "Evia"!

Yeah, I fixed it right after I said I would.

RickCorey said:

Oh, you speedboat!

Where I work, it would have taken a team of five more a week to say "No, we won't do that."

I've got to watch that new "Doctor Strange" movie to see whether HIS magic comes up to your standards.