Tim'n'Marion

[+Tim'n'Marion]

Just a question about searching for caches not found by a user in filters, why is the name graham&linda or even Pebbles&Co not recognised? When trying to plan a day out to find caches not found by a small group this is so useful when it is working.

 

Tim.

[+niraD]

56 minutes ago, Tim'n'Marion said:

Just a question about searching for caches not found by a user in filters, why is the name graham&linda or even Pebbles&Co not recognised? When trying to plan a day out to find caches not found by a small group this is so useful when it is working.

Usernames with special characters are grandfathered. You can't create a new username with those kind of characters. In theory, the code for the geocaching.com website could support such usernames perfectly. In practice, such usernames cause problems, and can no longer be created.

[+ChriBli]

5 minutes ago, niraD said:

Usernames with special characters are grandfathered.

That doesn't explain why it doesn't work. These names are grandfathered, not disallowed. Everything should work for those already created. Actually I don't understand the benefits of grandfathering something that you will have to support perpetually anyway. Or could the idea be to gradually remove support for special characters until people just give up and change their usernames?

[+niraD]

50 minutes ago, ChriBli said:

Or could the idea be to gradually remove support for special characters until people just give up and change their usernames?

That might be Groundspeak's intent. Or perhaps they figure that current users with special characters in their names are used to the bugs and glitches those special characters cause, but they don't want to deal with complaints from new users who choose names with special characters. Or perhaps something else. After all, I am not a lackey, and I don't even play one on TV.

[+ChriBli]

There is definitely something funny with specifically the ampersand, I just tried a username with space in it as well as the OP's username with apostrophes and they both work.

[+Hügh]

Ampersands are special characters in URLs that are used to separate GET parameters. Clearly the front-end isn't properly encoding (encodeURIComponent-ing) them, and so the server gets confused. It thinks that you're looking for caches not found by "graham", and "linda" is just a random additional parameter. To see this, visit https://www.freeformatter.com/url-parser-query-string-splitter.html and paste "https://www.geocaching.com/play/search?nfb[1]=graham&linda" into the box. Then scroll down to "query string."

 

To "fix" this, replace the ampersand in the person's username with "%26". For example, https://www.geocaching.com/play/search?nfb[0]=graham%26linda for caches not found by graham&linda

 

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EDIT: Oh, I see, it's the search bar in the filters panel that isn't working -- again, probably because they're not URL encoding before searching. You can see that when typing "graham&linda" it only autocompletes as far as "graham".

 

This is a bug. I suspect that this will get fixed soon; it's a fairly easy fix. But for now, you can manually set the not-found-by array in the URL by adding:

 

nfb[1]=graham%26linda&nfb[2]=Pebbles%26Co

 

and so on... to the end of the search URL. 

Edited October 3, 2021 by Hügh

[+ChriBli]

One could also use the "Map Compare" tool in Project-GC, I just tried it and it works fine with graham&linda. The downside is that it only compares two user's finds at a time.