Addition of filter by user or role

Hmm, I can see where that might be a handy feature.

I thought about this a little bit more and to be really, really useful it should be possible (for admin) to set the module up so it only listed users of type X. In my case this would allow me to have it list users with type 'writer' permissions but not list every single standard registered user. Probably actually making it usable for a site with a large numbers of users would be otherwise more complex (a pull down menu with 500 users would be unusable) but for some sites including my own the subset of users that could be listed would be quite small. I guess another path would be to get the searcher to input the username although that would be less friendly.

Hmm, interesting idea. I'll see what I can design.

Please do not reset my assignment to myself.

Do you see this as a setting that permanently limits the browser page, or as something that the end user can select? Also, you're saying "by permission" but do you mean "by role?"

I'd see this as something the user can select (as in 'I'd like to see all the articles on China written by Andrew') and yes I think I meant by role - basically core site users who can post articles are 'writers', other users can just post comments. Sorry for the delay in replying, I'm at stop 35 of a 44 city tour of N. America and my net access is pretty random.

Okay. I'm thinking something along the lines of the node_type_filter module. I'll need to see if there is something like that before I think about coding.

I've been researching what exists and the nearest I've found is the discussion of including a search by username function in D6 core that never made it but is being discussed in for D7. I'm actually kinda amazed that this doesn't seem to exist already as it seems such an obviously useful function for a wide range of sites although I guess because it is done in an ugly fashion in terms of the tracker with the possibility of doing a labour intensive one via tagging (each user having a tag) this means there are 'solutions' of a sort out there.

I'm a very novice user so its not impossible I have missed something that would be obvious to someone with more experience.

I'd like a link to that discussion.

Filtering by user is not terribly difficult; it's much like filtering by node type. However, filtering by role is considerably more complex as it involves finding all users who are in a role because nodes don't keep the role id for a user. And of course there are some additional complications like changing a user's roles and node revisions.

I am still looking at how to do this, but it is not my highest priority. With some 18 modules and 16 sites to maintain, I can only suggest what so many other developers suggest: "An offer of payment will change my priorities."