interesting.
i suppose you could work around the problem by making the project not invite-only, and then just message or e-mail (if you have their e-mails) your proposed members a link to the project and ask them to join it. (i’m not sure, but maybe it’s even possible to turn off invite-only for a moment to let treehu join and then turn it back on.)
but if you must go invite-only and can’t temporarily turn it off, then it seems to me like you’re stuck (unless the user changes their login). that particular field seems to rely on the universal search, which will return only the top 30 results by default. unfortunately, treehu shows up near the end of a list of 172 users that are returned by a search for “treehu”.
ideally, the search would prioritize exact matches, but it doesn’t seem to do that. there are a couple of existing feature requests that talk about trying to implement some sort of exact matching which would also be another way to address this:
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-exact-matches-in-header-search/8606
- https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/search-for-and-highlight-only-exact-matches/670
one last thing that i noticed was that the “About Invitations” box on the page seems to indicate that you should be able search by e-mail address, too, which could have offered another way to work around the problem. unfortunately, i don’t think you can search by e-mail. (it’s probably a good thing that you can’t search by e-mail, too, since that would open a small security/privacy hole.) i bring that up because the text on that page probably needs to changed to remove that part about searching by e-mails.