If you know the username of the person you are sending a note to (within the Send Message dialog window) you are fine, but if you don't, you are screwed, and must cancel the dialog and go search. A simply lookup popup similar to a "To..." type arrangement would be so helpful in this use-case.  drew..

Moved to proper forum.


How are you getting to the send message up without clicking on a user in the first place?

sorry for the misplacement..

I have provided links directly to the inbox for users, and if after reading your mail etc, a simply click on New Message will suffice to hit this use-case.

Did you enable member search? My users are able to begin typing the name of the user and it auto-populates for them

The New Message function has auto complete enabled.
http://www.activemodules.com/blogs/...messaging/

If you reread my original point you will see my point is *not* with the username.. ;) often we do not know the username of the person we seek to send a message to.

You don't need to know the username. It could be Username, display name or First name. In most cases it is based upon Display Name.

interesting.. this wasn't working for me as i tested it. I will go back and try again, perhaps i was completely misspelling my friend's name.

ok, this is getting confusing.. many of my users have usernames matching first names, some don't. To complicate this, i recently unfriended everyone and asked for refriending as i was completely not seeing any status updates from friended users. This act of refriended reconnected my status issues, but might be preventing me from seeing users in the dropdown. BUT.. i have just tested this against exact usernames of recently refriended people and the username is definitely not catching anyone, but the first name is and only the first name..

Perhaps i don't have paidinfull's suggestion done: enabling member searching. Since i am getting firstname lookup, where can i check to ensure i have searching enabled. Is this "Quick Search" to which we can enable 5 fields? I looked through options and don't see much more.

thanks for your patience! drew..

You may also want to check and make sure that you are not allowing users the option to hide their last name. I haven't tested this (currently unable to), but if (in theory) they can hide their last name, then only first name will display. I think this is done in the AS CP.

This is the way I do it: Force all modules to utilize displayname only. Under Admin > Users > User Settings: Displayname: I add in the firstname, lastname tokens. This forces the displayname to firstname lastname only and doesn't allow for any changes by enduser.

And during signup and other locations in the site, I make it clear that when signing up that persons first and last names will be visible throughout the site.

Again, this is just the way I do it for consistency to avoid usage of username, etc. You could also skip my step of adding in the tokens for displayname, and allow your users to change it when they want.