User became unsearchable until after indexing / cache flush - why?

[Jonathan Smith]

Hi everyone,

  I come back from vacation and a user tells me no one can mention him or search for him in our Confluence server instance.

I have since flushed the cache and indexed the environment, he then appeared. 

I undid the Thanos snap.

Anyone know why the user would be unsearchable in the first place? When troubleshooting, I was able to manually get to his administration profile page.

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello there Jonathan!

This is likely connected to problems with your index. If your index breaks, there is a chance that everything is unavailable for search or only parts of it are "out of order". We have an article about possible causes for a broken index:

Searching and Indexing Troubleshooting

There is also another document on this specific problem you were facing. Here it is:

Unable to @ mention certain users in Confluence

The starting point for fixing these types of issues is to re-index or re-index from scratch. You accomplished just that and was able to fix the issue, correct?

Here is how to rebuild the index from scratch:

How to Rebuild the Content Indexes From Scratch on Confluence Server

And here we have how to rebuild from the UI:

Content Index Administration

Looking forward to your Jonathan! Let us know.