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Add IRC name and MediaWiki Username as alternate auto-complete lookups
Closed, DeclinedPublicFeature

Description

The "Name" field ("alternate name"/"real name"/etc, as discussed in T798), is currently the only alternate way to refer to someone. So, if someone uses a different name onwiki and onIRC, it is impossible to discover who they are.
E.g. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/demon/ is currently going by the username "demon" and the alt-name "Chad Horohoe". He lists his IRC name as "ostriches" and his mediawiki-username as "😂" but neither of those names successfully autocomplete if I type them into the Subscribers field.
E.g.2. ditto for https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/Rdicerb/ and her IRC name "rdaiccherlb".
E.g.3. ditto for https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/p/jrbs/ and his IRC/LDAP name "foks"

Upstream report: https://secure.phabricator.com/T4267#47083

Event Timeline

Quiddity raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
Quiddity updated the task description. (Show Details)
Quiddity changed Security from none to None.
Quiddity added subscribers: Quiddity, Qgil.

(Possibly a separate task, or possibly will be solved by this task: Those names also don't come up in a general phab search, eg https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/vpBFGQ0Dec5f/#R. I suspect they should?)

Qgil triaged this task as Low priority.Oct 25 2014, 12:09 AM
Qgil added a project: Phabricator.

@chad just landed some elasticsearch stuff upstream that might be helpful here.

Probably not, beyond "it's now easier to make changes to this code" :)

This didn't get traction upstream. It might be something we could implement locally, I'm not sure how difficult it'd be.

There is a PhabricatorUser::NAMETOKEN_TABLE which is used for mapping arbitrary tokens to usernames, so it's as simple as adding a few new rows to that table with the tokenized values from the custom fields. Where to do this, I'm not exactly sure. I suppose it could be handled from within the custom field classes MediaWikiUserpageCustomField and LDAPUserpageCustomField... The IRC Nick custom field doesn't have a custom implementation class as it uses built-in standard custom field implementation.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Oct 28 2023, 2:16 PM
Aklapper subscribed.

I'm boldly declining this. Nice to have but doesn't seem to outweigh the additional code and UI complexity (what if my Phab username is JohnDoe and I use john on IRC and there is also a Phab username John? How would you render this? Display the Phab username and AKA and also MW username and also IRC username in the dropdown proposals so I'm able to distinguish? That's noisy.)