BuddyPress.org

Hi r-a-y,

Glad the filter is useful to you!

I think the answer to your question is yes, John Smith’s profile would come up in that kind of scenario. The links that are created in BP profiles are merely full-text searches on all BP profiles (this is the link behavior out of the box, and my filters do not change this). Even if the name “Smith” in John’s profile doesn’t link to http://[your-buddypress-url]/members/?s=Smith, that search URL will still be live and accessible from the regular BP search box.

I haven’t looked into the details, but it should be possible to build a plugin that limits search in different ways. You might, for instance, search all profile fields except those that have been tagged as non-searchable (last name, for example). Another strategy: you might only return a hit on (for example) “Smith” if the result appears between anchor tags; in this way, non-linked profile fields would automatically be excluded. The first kind of solution is probably the better one, and I imagine it will be quite easy once field-specific profile search comes along in BP 1.3 https://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/