The WSO Facebook1) is an online campus directory. It is accessible on campus without login and off campus by logging in with your OIT (Unix ID), Alumni, or WSO username and password. Please report any strange behavior (after looking over the info below) to wso [at] wso.williams.edu. The more descriptive your bug reports are, the easier the bug is to fix. Better yet, come to a meeting (join the wso-staff list) and help out!
The Facebook offers both static and live search options. The static search is a conventional search where you enter your query and hit return, after which the results are displayed. The live search presents results and narrows them as you type.
| Query | Meaning |
|---|---|
Ephraim | all people whose profiles contain the string “ephraim” (case-insensitive) |
Ephraim Williams | (intersection) all people who match both “ephraim” and “williams” |
Ephraim & Williams | (intersection) all people who match both “ephraim” and “williams” |
Ephraim, Hopkins | (union) all people who match “ephraim” plus all people who match “hopkins” |
Ephraim | Hopkins | (union) all people who match “ephraim” plus all people who match “hopkins” |
Ephraim Williams, Mark Hopkins | all people who match “ephraim” and “williams” plus all people who match “mark” and “hopkins” |
Ephraim, Hopkins & Thompson, Griffin | all people who match “ephraim” plus all people who match “hopkins” and “thompson” plus all people who match “griffin” |
(Ephraim, Hopkins) & (Thompson, Griffin) | all people who match “ephraim” or “hopkins” and also match “thompson” or “griffin” |
name: Ephraim | all people whose names match “ephraim” |
name: (Ephraim, Hopkins) | all people whose names match “ephraim” plus all people whose names match “hopkins” |
dorm: “Mark Hopkins” | all people whose dorm matches “mark hopkins” |
Parentheses can be nested to any depth. Labels cannot be nested. It doesn’t make sense to search only within the dorm field when already searching only within the name field, for example.
To search for people in the Facebook, you can enter search terms to be matched in any part of their profiles. For example, searching for Williams yields everyone who lives in Williams Hall, all students from Williamstown (or any other town with “Williams” in its name), anyone with “Williams” in their name, etc.
Single-word searches are pretty boring and often yield more results than you want. You can combine multiple search terms to create more powerful queries. The simplest way to do this is to separate search terms by space as you would in an internet search. For example, to search for the Ephraim Williams (as there are so many of them) who lives in Dodd, we would use the query
Ephraim Williams Dodd
or
Ephraim & Williams & Dodd
Let’s say we want a list of people living in the frosh quad. Alas, searching for frosh quad won’t do it, but neither will Williams Sage or Williams & Sage. What we want is
Williams, Sage
or
Williams | Sage
These will both yield all people who match “Williams” or “Sage”, or in other words, everyone who matches “Williams” plus everyone who matches “Sage.”
You can surround any of these operators (” “, “&“, “,“, “|“) with any number of spaces. Extra spaces will not change their meaning.
One problem you may see with all this is that it could be hard to search precisely for multi-word terms like “San Francisco” or “Mark Hopkins.” In reality, it’s not often an issue, but in some cases we just don’t want as results everyone matching “Mark” and “Hopkins,” but rather “Mark Hopkins” literally. In those cases you can use what probably seems the obvious approach: quotes. A search for “Mark Hopkins” does the trick.
Another shortcoming of matching each search term against any part of a person’s profile is that some searches, like finding someone named William who lives in... Williams Hall, are pretty much impossible. Luckily, we have labels to help narrow a search. For our hypothetical William of Williams Hall, we would use the following query:
name:William & dorm:Williams
It’s quite likely that you could guess the right label name for the job, but here is a list of labels are currently supported.
| Label | Searches by | Pertains to |
|---|---|---|
building:, bldg:, or dorm: | dorm (students) or building (faculty, staff) | everyone |
cell: or mobile: | cell phone number | everyone |
city: or town: | hometown | students |
class: or year: | class year | students |
country: | home country | students |
dept: or department: | department | faculty, staff |
email: | First.M.Last style email | everyone |
entry: | dorm entry letter or number | students |
home-phone: | home phone number | students |
major: | major | students |
name: | name | everyone |
neighborhood: or cluster: | campus neighborhood | students |
nickname: | nickname | everyone |
phone: or ext: | campus phone number | everyone |
room: | room number | students |
state: | home state (two-letter abbreviation) | students |
title: | title | faculty, staff |
unix: | Unix ID | everyone |
wso: | WSO username | everyone |
zip: | zip (postal) code of hometown | students |
Spaces after the colon (”:”) in a label are optional, but you cannot put a space between the label and the colon.
With the tools we have thus far, there are still some searches which would be difficult or annoying to do. For example, try to find all the people named Ephraim who live in the former freshman dorms that are now upperclass dorms (East, Fayerweather, Morgan, Lehman). Since the AND operators take precedence over the OR operators, we would have to type:
name:Ephraim & dorm:Lehman, name:Ephraim & dorm:Morgan, name:Ephraim & dorm:Fayerweather, name:Ephraim & dorm:East
I can tell you from experience (having just typed this), that it’s a pain. Instead, let’s use parentheses and do an equivalent search:
name:Ephraim & dorm:(Lehman, Morgan, Fayerweather, East)
That was not quite as bad. You’ll notice that, beyond the inclusion of parentheses, we’ve also made use of the fact that a label applied to a parenthesized subquery is applied to each of the terms inside that query. This is very handy, since it requires writing the label just once... In addition, you can nest parentheses as many times as you’d like and put spaces between parentheses and their contained search terms:
name:(( Ephraim, Mark ) & ( Williams, Hopkins) )
The operators discussed above group adjacent search terms in this order.
““ — quotes() — parentheses: — labels& — ampersand and space (AND)|, — pipe and comma (OR)Never fear: if you ever type something that the Facebook doesn’t understand, it will tell you and do its best job of pointing out what you did wrong, though it won’t go so far as to fix it for you. Perhaps someday...
If you prefer a more stepped approach to searching, you can enter a query and hit return, and then, once you see the results, check the “in results” box and enter a new query. This will search within the results that you’re currently viewing, so you can gradually narrow your search. (For those who are curious, this is exactly the same as entering: (your first query) & (your second query) ...) Your previous queries will be shown in a list below the search box. To start over, click the “clear” link at the beginning of that list.
You can choose how to view the results with the popup menu next to the search box. Results can be displayed in a table as a list of people without pictures or as mini address cards with pictures. The default is to choose automatically between picture and list view based on the number of results.
Clicking on a person’s name or picture in a list of results will display his or her full information. Additionally, when the number of people matching your search has reduced to one, the full information for that person will be displayed.
To upload a new picture or add a nickname, WSO username, or cell phone number to your profile, login from the Facebook page (the login link is up at the top of the page) and then click on the “Edit my profile” link (in the light yellow link bar under the big purple banner). Enter your information or choose a photo and click save. Photos are submitted for approval and must at least meet the guidelines on the Edit page to be accepted.
(Also listed on our policy page
Our data is drawn from OIT‘s LDAP and Ph servers. We do our best to keep this data up to date, and run several Facebook updates per semester. If you find that data is wrong, you may first verify that it is correct in your PeopleSoft database, and notify us at wso [at] wso.williams.edu if you find that your personal data does not reflect what is present on OIT‘s servers. We will then update our database to match information stored in OIT‘s servers.
If that process does not change the data in question, you may request that we manually update our database by emailing wso [at] wso.williams.edu. Please be patient, we are busy too. Changes must be appropriate and reflect verifiable truth.
Please report bugs to wso [at] wso.williams.edu. The more descriptive you can be, the easier it will be for us to find and fix the bug.
Live search occasionally will display the desired results and then replace them with a larger, less narrowed set of results. This is a basic flaw in how the live search functions, which does not account for the fact that queries with large numbers of results will take longer to return that a query with fewer results. (In fact, something of a race condition occurs.) Usually, deleting a character from your search and retyping it fixes the results, but if the problem persists, please use the static search. Fixing this does not have high priority right now, since static search is often easier to use anyway.