Either there’s something I seriously don’t understand, or there’s an inconvenient feature in the member search.

If you choose alphabetical order, the search only operates on the name of the member, rather than on all the extended profile fields. You can reproduce the problem by doing a member search on some word that appears in an extended profile field for at least one member, but isn’t in anyone’s name. You will get some members listed. If you change the order to Alphabetical, they will disappear.

This appears to be because on line 243 of bp_core_classes we take only the name record in the profile data table, if the ordering is alphabetical. If the ordering isn’t alphabetical we keep all the records, which is what we want. I think the way round it is to do two separate joins, one to get the extended profile field records in so that they can be searched, and another to provide the term on which to do the ordering.

Is there any way round this, other than modifying the function in the core file on my site (which doesn’t seem a particularly good idea)? I really need the alphabetical ordering, as the others are pretty meaningless to most of the users of my site.

Also, is this a known inconvenient feature? Or is it a bug, in which case I should report it?

[@karmatosed Moderator 13 years, 5 months ago]

Just my two cents but alphabetical to me would just be on name not on other fields also. Others may have different opinions but to me just being on name makes sense as a default

[@lpryor Participant 13 years, 5 months ago]

Yes, the ordering should be on name. But it should search on the other fields, surely? The way it does when you order by recently active, say?

Currently (straight out of the box default theme) it applies the search terms to all the extended profile fields if you order by anything other than alphabetical. If you order by alphabetical, it applies the search terms to the name only.

So if you keep the same search terms, but choose a different ordering, you get different members showing. This is counter intuitive, to say the least.