Search for user by email WITHOUT admin permission?

[CarolineS]

Hello ya'll!

Is there any way to allow some of our members (a few employees) to search for community members by email address? I don't want to give them full admin permissions, but they do have "Update Category" permission on a sub-category, if that makes any difference.

Cheers!

[lilim]

I don't believe this is possible OOTB. We had to create a completely separate tool to allow for employees to search for users by email, including the option to do this in bulk.

[CarolineS]

Thanks, @lilim!

I just got an update from support on this too:

I can see that users with permission for "Manage roles, user bans, and abuse notifications in admin and user profiles" set to grant will be able to search users by email address. However, as you can see this option is giving additional power to the user and hence I recommend to take a judicious call while granting this permission to a user.

So this is vaguely helpful, at least people don't have to be full admins!

[lilim]

Ah, right. We do use this permission for our spam moderators, but we weren't willing to give this to employees in general as it allows them to ban users. Might be worth the trade-off though if it's a smaller set of employees.

[CarolineS]

@lilim - for sure, I wouldn't give this to everyone. It also lets them manage user settings and remove all kudos given by a user. 

For others who stumble upon this thread: Here's what a user with the "Manage roles, user bans, and abuse notifications in admin and user profiles" sees on a user's profile (in addition to the "Manage Roles" module):

[rose_cobb]

To everyone here, if you haven't already make sure you check out the Ideas that were posted about this. 

Separate permission for searching for users by email address

View information that identifies another user without access to admin

[JuergenM]

Hi all,

to identify users by their email, came up as a requirement in a project recently. To invite users to new groups, Group Admins need to identify them by their email.

We put a tiny widget on the groupinvitespage, where group admins can search users by their email. Then they copy the email to the invite form and go on. Just a workaround. A widget like that can be integrated elsewhere ...

There is a restapi call for that, e.g.

https://www.yourcommunity.com/restapi/vc/users/email/user@domain.com

Try it out in a separate browser tab, while you are logged in as admin to the commununity in that browser. You get XML, look for <login>.

HTH

Jürgen

[CarolineS]

@JuergenM - what permissions did you need to give to your api user to be able to make that call? We have a project now where we need to be able to search for users by email address via API (but not do anything else). The "Manage roles, user bans, and abuse notifications in admin and user profiles" and "Make REST API V1 calls with read access" permissions don't seem to be sufficient.

Thanks!

[CarolineS]

@JuergenM NEVER MIND! My error! "Manage roles, user bans, and abuse notifications in admin and user profiles" is sufficient (and API access for V1 api)

[JuergenM]

@CarolineS  The question regarding permissions is definitely important. I believe, our API user has even more permissions. Good to know, it works with that permissions. Thanks!

[MarkAtTruth]

Interesting.  In Khoros JX community you can @mention a user and when you type in @username@domain.com it will find a corresponding user if the partial email matches and allow you to @mention the user.  It doesn't confirm the email address and changes to the username once you select it from the pop-up

It's not necessarily "Searching" in the context mentioned above but is very valuable if you're trying to locate someone who's username has changed or they might have multiple accounts.   for example fluffykitty123456789@gmail.com and fluffykitty123456789@yahoo.com Definitely doesn't guarantee those two people are the same person but usually there are other indicators that corroborate that they are and then you can help the user focus on one account going forward if merging isn't possible.