No message recipient suggestions for short member names

[ke]

Steps to reproduce in SMF 2.0.7:
1) Go to My Messages → Send a Message
2) In the "To:" field, enter the name of a member with less than three characters (such as myself in this community).

Expected behavior:
A box listing matching member names pops up, with the one you entered on top, so you can hit Enter and the member is added to the list of recipients below the text field.

Actual behavior:
No box pops up.

Discussion:
This is irritating. Although apparently just leaving the member name in the text field is enough to ensure delivery, this is not intuitively clear to me as a user, especially if I message multiple people at once and those that do have 3 or more characters in their name do get recognized and added to the list.
While I see the rationale for not fetching the list of all matching members from the server before the sender has typed at least 3 characters (that list could get rather long on a big forum), I think it would be a good idea to at least fetch those immediately whose name does not have that many characters. Otherwise, they can never be found.

[margarett]

You can adjust that for your case in Themes/default/script/suggest.js

Code Select Expand

// How many characters shall we start searching on?
this.iMinimumSearchChars = 'iMinimumSearchChars' in this.opt ? this.opt.iMinimumSearchChars : 3;


Change the "3" to 1 and you have suggestions from the first character you type

You probably need to "hard" refresh your browser (CTRL+F5) because the scripts are usually cached

It's not a bug, it's really by design.

[emanuele]

That may not solve the problem.
If I remember correctly the sorting of the names returned is by... id_member? If so, it's unlikely "ke" will be in the first 5/10 names sent out by the autosuggest when "k" is pressed.

[margarett]

Yup, you're right. But on a small community probably when he writes "ke" it will be enough