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In Charcoal HQ, from time to time, we create a detection for a username which has been used in a lot of spam posts across the network. We need to make sure that the username being considered for use in a detection won't catch posts by genuine users, so we search for the specific username to see if it is used by legitimate users.

Usually, we conduct this search on Stack Overflow and the sites where the user has left spam posts, but this is not as thorough a search as we'd like, as there are many other Stack Exchange sites.

Is there any way to search for users with a specific username across the network, even if they don’t have any posts?

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I must have missed that discussion ... anyway, it's relatively simple to write a SEDE query for this. Here is the list of all 145 Daniils in the network. I heard the top one posts a lot of ... eh ... about spam.

(Note that SEDE is updated once a week, on Sunday morning. Brand new spam accounts may not be in there.)

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An alternative to SEDE is Google Search. To search all Stack Exchange sites for a specific name, enter such thing as the search term:

Daniil inurl:/.com/users site:stackexchange.com OR site:stackoverflow.com OR site:superuser.com OR site:serverfault.com OR site: askubuntu.com OR site:stackapps.com

example.

This will search the SE domains, and only in pages having "/users" i.e. profiles.

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  • Does this cover sites like serverfault.com?
    – user707129
    May 25, 2020 at 11:57
  • @Daniil This will search only in stackexchange.com domain - so, no.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    May 25, 2020 at 12:00
  • @Glorfindel Is there a way to include multiple domains like site:stackexchange.com,serverfault.com etc.?
    – user707129
    May 25, 2020 at 12:15
  • @Daniil webapps.stackexchange.com/q/129736/136642
    – Glorfindel Mod
    May 25, 2020 at 12:17
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    @Daniil edited answer.
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    May 25, 2020 at 12:45
  • Note that user profiles with no activity are not indexed by Google (SE doesn’t tell Google about those profiles because spammers have been generating spammy profiles en masse)
    – Martijn Pieters
    Sep 6, 2020 at 2:34

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