# Search Function / User List



## Guppy (Jun 5, 2006)

I've been an abuser of the search function in the past, and I can tell you the reason.

There's no list of artists on the site, so I used the search box to find those artists.

The site REALLY needs an easy way to browse artists, I have to hit the search engine every now and then to see if any of the people I used to watch have signed up yet.  A list of artists that can be browsed by name, or sorted by date joined would be really handy.

I remember bringing this up to Dragoneer before the site opened, but I'm sure it was forgotten about, has anyone else been looking for this feature?


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## uncia2000 (Jun 5, 2006)

Yep, Guppy; skip-browse user directory alphabetically, search by name pattern, species/fav animal, etc. All would be very good to have.

Personally I'd prefer to see a sleek text results set - e.g. User name/registered date/last signed in/+watches/+favs - rather than just bulked-out icons, since it would be useful to see a large number of results at once; both for searching for specific users and more general community browsing.
(Or perhaps a relatively well space-compressed scrollable list with those 60x60 icons, along with that summary info?).

Hasn't been forgotten... Just on the _long_ list, I'm afraid.
Thanks for the nudge.


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## Dragoneer (Jun 5, 2006)

uncia2000 said:
			
		

> Hasn't been forgotten... Just on the _long_ list, I'm afraid.
> Thanks for the nudge.


Mainly because there's no easy way to handle it yet. We'd need a system that could arrange users in an alphabetical and numeric fashion and allow a parsing so that ONLY artists could be listed on the site.

We could do this manually, but it would require the submission of thousands of names and be astronomical in the time taken to sort everything out. I can do this, however... but it'd have to be an "artist only" listing and I'd have to doublecheck and verify that each and every user who submitted it was, in fact, and artist, writer or musician or a person whom creates to prevent from people just trying to add themselves to "the list".

Full site indexes of 20,000+ users would become impossible hard to maintain and browse and would put a strain on the system. So, we need to find a way to handle this without the list (or us mods) becoming spammed to the point where we die of explosive coronaries.

It's on my personal list of things to handle and one of my higher priorities, but it's not quite as simple as just "doing it".


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## Myr (Jun 5, 2006)

Guppy, I think the best way to make this happen is to use our existing information about artists in the user database, and create a VCL-style artist listing. Since that listing is so huge and our's would also be huge, I have recommended we use a system that orders artists alphabetically like sites like http://pc.ign.com order their games listing. It makes it easier to quickly get to artist names faster and also helps reduce server load. >^.=.^<


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## Tensik (Jun 5, 2006)

Another thing that I noticed seems to drag down the system (or at least thats how it looks on my end) is when you do a piece search (say, for horses) it brings up EVERYTHING under that filter.  The option to only search things uploaded within a range of timeframes, or artists that joined within a certain timeframe  (that day, within a week, a month, 6 months) might help a bit, I don't know.


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## Guppy (Jun 10, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Mainly because there's no easy way to handle it yet. We'd need a system that could arrange users in an alphabetical and numeric fashion and allow a parsing so that ONLY artists could be listed on the site.
> 
> We could do this manually, but it would require the submission of thousands of names and be astronomical in the time taken to sort everything out. I can do this, however... but it'd have to be an "artist only" listing and I'd have to doublecheck and verify that each and every user who submitted it was, in fact, and artist, writer or musician or a person whom creates to prevent from people just trying to add themselves to "the list".



On my site I actually have a timestamp on the users for this purpose that's set when they've posted something (specifically so it doesn't have to spider the image database to get a list of names).  When I implemented it I just set everyone that had a posting to the current date/time so that everyone who that had posted would show up when I searched for a last_post_date that wasn't NULL.

Then you can:
 select username from users where not(last_post_date is null)

then limit it by whatever... where username like "a%"; or limit 60; or whatever sort of paging you'd like to do.

It's also good not to use user icons on this page to keep server load down, though you can allow mouseover icons that load as needed.


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