BuddyPress.org

If you view the source of your Admin profile page, you have something strange happening:

<p><a href="http://randyjensenonline.com/wpmutest/members/?s=blah</p>

<p>blah</p>

<p>blah">blah</p>

<p>blah</p>

<p>blah</a></p>

There is an “a” tag that does not close until the last “blah”. Did you place the href in there, or did it populate the field on its own after saving?

Perhaps the infamous “Blah” bug–whatever that is.

So this only appears to happen in the Admin user’s profile fields. Okay, a few more questions:

1. What happens if you delete the “blah” data, save the emptied out field, and then reenter some data in that same field?
2. What happens if you create a new text field and try entering data? Does it also create links?
3. What happens if you delete that field then recreate it and enter data?

I’m posting this from my mobile so I don’t have access to BP code at the moment but I’ll find where the linking happens so you can see how it works. There’s a little science to it, but it’s actually working the way it’s coded to.

I just tried this on a test site of mine. Within the Basic field grouping, all fields, including radio button fields, are turned into links. Yep, radio button fields. Tell me how that makes sense. It grabs the text from the selected option field and displays that as a link. I can understand it display the text from the selected radio button, but turning that into a link makes no sense at all.

The linking occurs in other field groups as well, not just the basic field group.

I’ll look at the codebase tomorrow to see what’s going on. I think it is something in get_edit_html() that is causing this issue.

@jensenrandy-

I’ve actually just isolated the bug. Interestingly enough, bp.org (this site) also has this bug. I suppose you could call it a feature, but creating links to what seems like nothing is a bug to me. Go into your profile on this site and look for yourself.

Of course the clue was in the linking text I highlighted in my first post–but I failed to notice. I can get the profile fields to work properly by commenting out a certain filter. I’m trying to determine the proper patch. I’ll post the bug ticket number back here when I have it all figured out.

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.

Any progress on this? I like having Location entries clickable (city, state) but nothing in the About section, so I don’t want to turn it off completely.

For me, this doesn’t happen every time. Most times, the About field info isn’t clickable. But when I added HTML (to see if it worked) then deleted that info and added something else, the new info was clickable.

Good: http://www.diymusicreview.com/members/henry-baum/

Bad: http://www.diymusicreview.com/members/kristen-tsetsi/