find another player and usage of wildcards?

[+zo kom je nog eens ergens.nl]

the feature "Find another player" works well if you know the correct spelling of the other player.

But since you are looking for someone, and mostly you do not know the name exactly, you want to use wildcards...

our name is by example a difficult name to seek, but even a capital-difference at a simple name does the seek-function not "understand".

 

Maybe an idea for a fix?

[Rhialto]

I second that. A few times I tried to search a name and had a hard time finding it.

 

Why not use ABC* and get a list of all users who's name start with ABC?

[+Prime Suspect]

I second that. A few times I tried to search a name and had a hard time finding it.

 

Why not use ABC* and get a list of all users who's name start with ABC?

You mean like this?

 

[+BBosman]

Currently that only works for the beginning of a name. If I only know the end...

[GeoVlinder]

Or like this?

 

member name begins with or contains option

 

Edited April 11, 2008 by geovlinder

[Ferreter5]

Also, the search never returns more than 21 names in the dropdown list.

 

Try searching with the string "Team" and only 21 names are returned even though there are way more names that start with "Team".

[+sTeamTraen]

the feature "Find another player" works well if you know the correct spelling of the other player.

But since you are looking for someone, and mostly you do not know the name exactly, you want to use wildcards...

 

I'm trying to think of how many people would not have the correct spelling of your name available, but would have the correct spelling of a sufficiently large part of it, for a wildcard search to work.

 

For example, if I didn't speak Dutch and I just heard you say "our team name is ' zo kom je nog eens ergens punt en ell', I doubt if I would be able to spell a single word.

 

On the other hand, if I did speak Dutch (stel je voor!), I might not remember all of it, but I would probably remember "ergens", as being the longest and least common word. So I could type "ergens geocaching" into Google and see what came out (you came out in second place). Or, I could look at my GSAK database for logs by people whose name contained "ergens".

 

Actually, I think it would be cool to be able to type a wildcard like "%ergens%" (it's SQL under the hood, hence the percent signs ), but given the inevitable restriction on the number of results returned (see below), this wouldn't help in a lot of cases. And even if you only get, say, three or four replies back, how can you be sure it's the right one? You yourself might end up fielding enquiries from people looking for "Team eggnog" or "<something>.nl".

 

Also, the search never returns more than 21 names in the dropdown list.

 

Try searching with the string "Team" and only 21 names are returned even though there are way more names that start with "Team".

 

Presumably this is to prevent your browser from exploding . If all you know about a team is that their name starts with "Team" then are you really going to wade through all 20,000 (etc) names which start with "Team" (plus the other 20,000 which contain "Team" somewhere else, such as ours) to see if it sounds like the one you thought you heard someone say at an event that other day?

 

I also think that Groundspeak probably has an interest in making it hard for people to obtain a complete list of usernames. I'm pretty happy with that.

Edited April 13, 2008 by sTeamTraen