Usernames with symbols are not searchable

[Chaos99]

For some reason, my account @Chaos_99@pixelfed.social can not be found with the search on pixelfed.social. It can be found on other federated servers like mastodon.social.
It doesn't matter if I search for the full name with instance, just the name or with/without the '@' in front.
This is both true for me searching for myself as well as friends searching for me.

I tried to search for other accounts and found that some are also not discover-able.
Common issue seems to be a special character like '_' or '-' in the name.

[Chaos99]

Must be more than the underscore. At least also the dash character: Try searching for user 'Jean-Paul' or 'Ben-J'

[cmho]

Additional note to maybe look into while investigating—local profiles without underscores or other non-letter/number characters seem to appear twice in search.

[dansup]

@Chaos99 The search does not support remote profile discovery yet, this will be fixed soon!

[cmho]

@dansup weirdly I was able to find and pull up a remote profile for @carly@kitty.town (my mastodon account) by searching "carly" to search for my own profile :|a

[dansup]

@cmho Pixelfed search can't discover a new profile like other implementations can by pasting the url to the profile, but if a remote account is already known by the instance it will appear in results. That kitty.town account must have interacted with pixelfed.social already!

[Chaos99]

@dansup Can you define 'remote profile'? My account 'Chaos_99' as well as that of 'Jean-Paul' are local to pixelfed.social.

[Chaos99]

Interestingly, today on pixelfed.social I could enter "crossg" into the search field and find @crossgolf_rebel@pixelfed.de in the results.
Searching for mindaffecter_ef@pixlfd.me didn't work.
Search for myself also didn't work as reported above.

[Chaos99]

In 0.8.5 the search interface is reworked. But the problem still persists.
Neither myself (probably because of the underscore) nor profiles from other instances can be searched.
(And without this, I don't know if profiles from other instances can be followed at all.)

[dansup]

Fixed in #1136

[Chaos99]

I'd like to re-open this ticket. According to the milestone planning, this should have been active at 0.9.0, but my account still can't be searched and pixelfed.social is on 0.9.2.

I also see this for the account @mindaffecter_ef@pxlfd.me, but as this is from another instance, this might be another issue.

I DO see that other accounts with '_' are returned by the search engine, so the issues might be something different.

[trwnh]

looks working to me https://pixelfed.social/i/results?q=chaos_99

[Chaos99]

Doesn't work for me or two other people I've asked.

[muesli]

@Chaos99 Maybe it's just not finding yourself now? I can find your account on pixelfed.social now, fwiw. I can also not find myself with my own account.

[trwnh]

Yeah, looks like your own account isn't returned via search

[Chaos99]

Yeah, looks like your own account isn't returned via search
I'd like to add this to the bug report then. Seeing your profile as it appears to others (including you showing up in searches/discovers) is an important verification tool.

I've asked the other guys that can't find my profile to either comment here or send me screenshots of their searches.

[dansup]

@Chaos99 Your own profile will not appear in search results.