Hello,

I'd really like to use the director for a few things, but it has a couple of limitations that are causing trouble. I'd hoped that by posting them here, either somebody might know a fix, or perhaps the team might choose to improve them.

• You can't filter by profile fields when using other filter types. For example, I can't filter by "Group", but with Country = "France" or something. This seems odd to me because that's what an advanced search does, so it's all there in the framework. There's just no option to do that because of the design of the settings. We actually want to use this as a way to say "show our members", but not if they've marked an option to "hide from the directory" in their profile.
• The advanced search doesn't let you turn off any of the four fields. Ideally, there should be an option for "None". If you want advanced search, but don't only want people to be able to search by name and country, you can't. 
• The "simple" search is too simple. Here, it would be nice if you could specify fields searched by the "simple" search. We use this for an academic association, and people just assume it searches the university names where people are located. I recognize that's a bigger request, but I think that's how most people expect a search to work now.
• The "Group" search includes expired users. I took that as a highly problematic bug and reported it last night.

I appreciate any thoughts on these - particularly if there's some simple way to fix them.

Thanks,

Mike

Thanks, as always, Cathal.

I definitely understand about the efficiency concerns - obviously, if it's slow, people won't use it. Still, I feel like there must be a way to achieve these varying goals. I'm mostly just thinking out loud here, but would it help if the user profile settings included an option for "Index for Search" or something that would tell the system to keep that (along with perhaps display name and email) in a special cache for rapid searching? Then, the "simple search" could just search that index? I don't know.

With that said, I think some of these suggestions could be done without too much trouble. For example, having a way to remove a third or fourth field from the advanced search seems like a simple design option. Also, since there is a way to filter by profile field already, why can't that be combined with a group filter? I suspect it means that it would always be running an advanced search, but that's often do-able, particularly on smaller sites.

As a minor other comment, it looks like there's no "loading" message for advanced searches - since they can take a second, that gets confusing.

Sorry to lump all of these together here, I just thought I'd see if anybody else had any thoughts on this stuff or if there were obvious problems I was missing rather than submitting them all.

Mike