This is just a speculative post brought on by seeing this forum post about finding experts in given taxa. @haemocyanin11 was looking for an expert in a particular species, and @thebeachcomber chimed in to suggest that, in addition to looking at the leaderboard for the focal species, it might be good to look at top IDers for higher taxa as well (good advice!).
That first recommendation to look through the leaderboards for a taxa to try to find “experts” (or credentialed folks or however you want to class that) is pretty standard for iNat. However, I also know that lots of users specifically mention the groups that they are most interested/expert in in their profile text. I thought I’d help find a solution to the above post by trying to search for profiles with “Geometridae” (or “Geometrid*”) in them, but realized that there doesn’t seem to be a way to search profile text (though maybe I’m just missing it?). It looks like the profile search only looks at names and emails.
Would the capability to search profile text be a useful thing for some users? It might not be to hard to implement if so. On a side note, with some of the discussions about the pros/cons of the leaderboards (and the primary pro being finding experts for taxa to help with IDs), having alternate ways to find experts might be useful in general. Anyways, maybe that’s a stupid idea, but thought I’d throw it out there to hear folks’ thoughts!
*Edit: Now a feature request for interested folks.