When trying to create an account, I put in my full name “Daniel Patterson”, and was presented with a page full of results, of which my name was missing (even though I have content from POPL17 and PLDI17, hence trying to create a profile).

Rather, I was shown many people with my first name, “Daniel”. There was no option to go to the next page of results, so I thought I was simply missing (or there was a bug in the system). But then I thought to put in only my last name to the field marked “Full name”, and then there were just two results, of which I was one.

So, this is really two bugs:

1. People need to be able to link to existing accounts, so pagination is necessary on the signup page. Perhaps if I had just gone on to try to create a new account with the same email, it would have linked, but it’s misleading and confusing to not show it in the search page.
2. If a field says “Full name” and someone puts a full name that matches a name in the system, that result had better be first. If you want to do partial matches in the absence of an exact match, that’s fine, but full matches need to work!

Submitted on 20 April 2017 at 16:48

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for reporting. It turns out that the suggestions were ordered alphabetically, and not by search rank. I’ve just changed this in the sources, so this will be improved in next release. Also, the number of results were limited to 50 hits. I think with the sorting fixed, one should not need to look after 50+ suggestions. And in case they are not listed while they’re actually in the system, the system will report during registration. But with the ranking fixed, I think this cannot occur anymore.