How to find out who are the people registered on spnetwork?

[johncarlosbaez]

My understanding is that the spnetwork only searches G+ posts by people who have registered to use the selected papers network. Darij Grinberg complained that his test post didn't work, and I couldn't see any other obvious problem with his post, so I wanted to see if he's registered. But I don't see a way to do this.

There are lots pages for individual people on the spnetwork, that say things like

SelectedPapers.net > People > Qiaochu Yuan

on top. I can click on SelectedPapers.net to get to the homepage, and click on Qiaochu Yuan to get to page I'm already on (!), but I can't click on People to see who is registered on spnetwork. As long as the list is short, it might be nice to have a list. In the long run a search box would be better.

[cjlee112]

Clarification: selectedpapers.net indexes all G+ posts that contain the spnetwork hashtag; there is no requirement to register on selectedpapers.net. RE: Darij's post, Google+ seems to be either slow or flaky in providing the full list of posts for our #spnetwork query. Even when I type this query in a Google+ webpage search box, the results do not show Darij's post. We need to ask Google+ developers about this apparent bug.

Seems like there are lots of other reasons people might want to search for people on selectedpapers.net, either to jump straight to their posts, see if they're active, or to invite them. We can certainly add that as a search option.

[cjlee112]

We need to figure out exactly what searches people would want. Some ideas:

• search registered spnet users (i.e. someone who's posted or logged in) by name
• search Google+ people (not yet registered, possibly to invite them into a specific discussion) by name
• search arXiv authors (e.g. to look at their papers) by name

Please comment on what seems very useful vs. not so useful

[johncarlosbaez]

As you know, the first one is the one I want to do, that I don't see a way to do:

• search registered spnet users (i.e. someone who's posted or logged in) by name

The second one is already easy to do on Google+:

• search Google+ people (not yet registered, possibly to invite them into a specific discussion) by name

And the third one is already easy to do on the arXiv and on spnetwork:

• search arXiv authors (e.g. to look at their papers) by name

For example, if I type "Brendan Fong" in the search box that shows up by default on spnetwork, the top three hits are arXiv papers by Brendan Fong. It would be nice if it were as easy to find Brendan Fong's comments on spnetwork (or see that there aren't any).

[bkloeckn]

I confirm Johna Baez' comment: to be able to search for people that have posted with the hashtag #spnetwork is important. Whether they have registered is only slightly relevant to me.

[cjlee112]

Implemented search option 1 as you suggested.

[bkloeckn]

Christopher, that sounds great but I can't find where to do the search on spnet.

[cjlee112]

it's not yet deployed to the production server. We usually stage a bunch of changes before deploying a new software release, among other things, to test it on our own to reduce the likelihood that we are introducing bugs into the production server. When it's deployed we change the label on the issue to "testAndClose", requesting that other people verify that the fix works well for them.

[cjlee112]

You can now test this on selectedpapers.net. The search permits regular expressions, and is case-sensitive (i.e. "baez" won't find "Baez").

[semorrison]

Hmm, while regular expressions are nice, it seems case-insensitivity would be even better.

[cjlee112]

@semorrison Great point! I researched this, and we can easily make the search case-insensitive by prepending (?i) to the user's query. And the user can turn case-insensitivity off by starting their query with (?-i). I just tested that this works as expected on the selectedpapers.net People query.

Background: Regular expressions are currently the main tool for MongoDB text search, but they are testing a "full text search" feature that offers more intuitive text search behaviour (more like a Google search) and ranking (most relevant documents first). When full-text search becomes ready for production usage, we can consider switching our searches to use that.

[cjlee112]

Implemented and deployed as outlined above, so People, Topics, and Comments searches are case-insensitive unless user begins his query with (?-i)

[bkloeckn]

Just tested, this seems fine to me.