BuddyPress.org

Update:

By the way, I should have provided a little more detail. Whereas I call this a bug, technically what is happening is all profile data, except URLs, are filtered to make them searchable–unless the field data has more than 5 non-comma separated words in a row (don’t ask why that limit, I don’t know).

So, if you hover your cursor over the field value, you’ll see this toward the end of the link:

?s=

This creates a search link for the keyword or phrase which when clicked on should perform a search that brings up related results. Of course, on a development site, you more than likely will not have any relevant results.

Whereas in general I like the idea of making data searchable via links (it’s sort of like tags), this implementation is flawed. At a minimum, it should not be linking the user’s “Full Name” field as the best search result for that is for the viewer to stay exactly where they currently are–on that member’s profile. Also, linking radio button groups or checkbox selections seems unnecessary. The data in these types of fields is often too specialized to be of much meaning in a search. Furthermore, the code arbitrarily excludes phrases over 5 words long. Finally, clicking on one of these links can be confusing to users as it sends them to the members homepage without explaining what is going on. Only in very large sites will any relevant results be returned.

It might be nice if there was an administrative option to not make profile fields clickable.

I have not yet figured out an appropriate patch to the filter function. But, when I do, I’ll add it to this trac ticket.

In the meantime, if you wish to simply deactivate this “feature”, you could use a remove_filter() call to disable the offending filter.