User search/profiles

[Insomnia]

OK....time for a stoopid question. Is there any way to search for a user profile?

Some users have never posted, and if you know their ID, there seems to be no way to get to the profile...or is it just that I've missed it?

[depp]

There is the option of searching by username on the search page. If you want a listing of all user profiles we do not publish that list anymore.

[Insomnia]

I wasn't after the full user list - just the ability to search for a user's profile, rather than their posts. If, for instance, I had a conversation in private messages with someone who had never posted publicly, then deleted the contents of my inbox and sent mail, I would have no way of getting to their profile, despite knowing their id.
I realise that's a rather specific turn of events, and the more common use would be laziness, but I was wondering if there was a way or not.

[Davros]

Originally Posted by Insomnia

I wasn't after the full user list - just the ability to search for a user's profile, rather than their posts. If, for instance, I had a conversation in private messages with someone who had never posted publicly, then deleted the contents of my inbox and sent mail, I would have no way of getting to their profile, despite knowing their id.
I realise that's a rather specific turn of events, and the more common use would be laziness, but I was wondering if there was a way or not.

Also a question for depp:

If you have a user account, say on YouTube, it's easy to search a user because you'd search youtube.com/user. How come on getDare we have numbers

[Collared_Slave]

im standing in for depp- because they have something that can work with a name- ours is setup for numbers.

[lucky]

I think you can do a simple search using the user name. If he has no posts at least the title says "user <link> ...." and pressing that link you would go to his profile.

Using numbers is already implemented in the database and almost impossible to change. And... searching for the activity of an user is usually an admin job. It is better when privacy is protected somehow.

[Collared_Slave]

i know how a youtube like system could be implemented though.

[Looking4somename]

Originally Posted by NewSlave

Also a question for depp:

If you have a user account, say on YouTube, it's easy to search a user because you'd search youtube.com/user. How come on getDare we have numbers

That depends on the system. Who ever programmed this forums (vBulltein with depp changing things, I suppose) chose to give every user an ID (which is typical when creating databases.)
Baiscly, instead of working with usernames, the system works with these IDs to list users and then uses this ID to obtain the username that belongs to it. Imaging a table with a few coulmns, two of which are ID and username (there's also password, email, age and other stuff) - this table is organized by the IDs (baiscly, the first line is the user who's ID is 1, the second is 2 and so on...)

Using IDs or Usernames is practically the same, it just depends on the primary key(s) you set and the method you use for transfering data between pages. In getDare's case, using numbers might not allow you to go to a user page using the address-bar (unless you know is ID, which isn't used for anything other than listing here, so I don't suppose you do), but other than that - it's basicly the same.

[depp]

I am very cautious about adding too may features as we are based on vBulletin software. Adding major features means updates take a long time. When I decide to add things (like the slave/master script) I have to weight how important it is to the site verses the amount of time it will take me to port it into new versions.

I will look into adding this feature in the future (name as part of profile URL) but in the past things like it have lead to abuse.