Make searching less stupid (aka smarter)

Searching for users is a key part of using the backend tools. However, search as currently implemented needs to be smarter. Consider a user imported from a facebook page as:

"Firstname Middlename Lastname"

If I search for "Firstname Lastname" I don't get a result. Forget searching for a nickname (like Tom instead of Thomas or Rob instead of Bob). Thankfully I know to try the % for pattern matching so I searched for "Firstname%Lastname" and found it. But these search rules should be implemented by default.

Now how about if you search for this:

"Firstname  Lastname" that's "Firstname(space)(space)Lastname"

No matches even if you have a user Firstname Lastname. When would I ever want to search with spaces being relevant? How about searching for:

"Lastname Firstname"

No results!

Better to split the search text by whitespace and recombine into the queries to search but you should still do all the queries and just prioritize by matches. Just because I have a Fred Jones doesn't mean I don't want to see that there is a Frederick Jones when I search for "Fred Jones".

Advanced Search - provide a list of tags to exclude

For some of us, we have a large list of people in our voter database (150,000+). To add all of them to the shopping cart and then to remove certain tags from them is time-consuming (on our end) and resource-consuming (on your end). It takes forever if it works at all frankly.

Better would be an additional search field under Tags where we can list tags to exclude from the search.

Advanced Search - Households for canvassing

One extremely important feature for canvassing is to be able to include all the people in a given household in a walk or call list. For example, if you're going door-to-door you want everyone in the household listed in case they are the ones answering the door. By household I mean everyone at the same exact address (including apt # so don't use lat/lng).

Ideally there are two areas where householding should be used. When printing a walk list (or call list) an option to "include others in household" should be added. If selected, all others in household should be added but ideally there should be some indicator that they are "secondary" to the primary targets. Boldface perhaps.

The second place would be during searches. There could be a button that takes an existing search result and "households it" adding all others in the same addresses. There could be another checkbox during the search - maybe next to the green search button - to make that happen at search time.

I consider both of these crucial for real door-to-door realities.

Thanks...

Official response from Adriel Hampton completed

After creating a list, select the list and use the "Households" tab and add people from the same home to your walk and call sheets. 

Auto-default the field names when importing a file

After I upload a CSV, it'd be great if the field pulldowns could be defaulted to the column names in the first line of the CSV.

Official response from Jim Gilliam

Whenever I import something into another app, the auto-defaulting fields never works right and always ends up being more of a pain.  It's also more prone to errors as false positives can be very dangerous.

I'm more inclined to do Jerimee's suggestion, to save previous import mappings and use those if the columns are the same.. that seems like a more reliable approach that will solve the underlying problem which is just making the import process faster.  What do you think?

Smart sorting within addresses when creating walk lists

Currently the people at an address are listed in no particular order. For consistency, individuals should be sorted by age with the oldest at the top. This will place the parents at the top of the list with any grown children below that.