When the user requests an exact name search, why not do a simple lookup on the username to grab their ID, then it's extraordinarily easy to just go SELECT whatever FROM post WHERE userid = $userid

And with that, provided the user entered the username in correctly, will provide *exact* results.

That is another thing which annoys me on the "Search All posts by this user" icon. It should check the userID of the posts, not that silly text field. In that case you don't even have to look-up anything, the userid is provided in the postbit! I'm going to make it work like that tonight if anyone is interested. Otherwise I will keep the tiny hack to myself!