Why would AS not work on one particular user?

[kurious]

Just curious... I used Advanced Search to look for posts by one particular user who I saw post on a thread (no other search constraints) and it tells me No Search Results.
Even though:

• there are posts by that user, eg the one I was looking at in the beginning;
• if I use Google, not MN's own search, I find lots of other posts by this user;
• it's not that AS is generally broken, because if I search for a random other user it works fine;
• I'm 100% sure I didn't mistype the username - I even tried copying and pasting it from my successful Google search.

So is it a glitch, or is it a feature that AS might actually be disabled for a particular user as target? If it's a feature, is it one that gets turned on by request, or only in really special circumstances?

(I won't say which user I was looking at, in case it is some kind of special witness protection thingy! Of course if MNHQ want to know to try it out I can PM.)

Hi kurious,
That is very interesting.

We aren't aware of anything specific that would cause this to happen.
Can you email us at contactus and we can have a closer look.

I've mailed, thanks. It's not important, just weird.

I had exactly this the other day!!

Ha! Not, I assume, with the same user... (though if the one you couldn't search was also... ooh, let's pick something that's not too much of a giveaway but isn't very likely to happen by chance, like, was also a username that had c as the 8th character - pm me!) Maybe the MN techs might find it useful to have another example of an unsearchable username, so you might email it to the contactus address Jen mentioned, too?

I'm trying to remember who it was - I was on a thread and something seemed a bit off so I searched to see what the user had posted before. I shall see if I can figure it out.

Found it! Thanks to laptop remembering all my searches! No "c" in it at all. But will PM JenMumsnet with the name.

I've had this with several users over the years

Oooh I've jsut seen that the thread was deleted - BUT - I couldn't search for the user even while I was reading the thread, going back to it after searching, so the deletion was clearly NOT the reason for not finding the user iyswim.

Update: MNHQ tell me the techs can't replicate this issue - which is weird in itself, since for the user in question, I've asked several other people to try and they all see the same problem I do (using a variety of browsers and OSs, even). Anyway, I give up, but if anyone else who's also seen the issue would like to have a go, and maybe has some inspiration about what may be going on that would help Tech replicate it, have at it!

Interesting. I will definitely keep this thread in mind and make sure to report it when it comes up for me again in the future.