Users can not assign merge requests to Me

I am the site-wide admin of a local private gitlab-CE instance. When someone searches in the merge request edit screen, my userid is not found when they search by wpostma, @wpostma or Warren. This is dismaying, and I have no idea how to debug it. The thing that might be special is that my account exists in two flavors, I believe, one is an LDAP login, and one is a non-LDAP gitlab-only login.

Has anyone seen anything like this? If I want to report it, should I just report it on gitlab issues, and maybe include some server side logs?

Interestingly this issue does not reproduce if I impersonate the user, only when they log in via LDAP.

Warren

Oh I figured it out.

My user did not know that he needed to type some text and search for my name by typing W. The pre-populated list of 8 choices seemed like “all the choices that must exist” and thus, I believe, made the user interface of Gitlab unclear to the user.

The UI choice of pre-populating a few random users is undesirable. It would be better to make the person type, or to only populate “designated reviewers” if a pre-populated box is desirable.

If it looks like a combobox, it must be a combobox, an example of “Affordances” at work as a UX anti-pattern.