Per an issue we encountered in -help today, I thought it would be a nice feature to be able to search for a user based on a string (including wildcards). This would allow the helper to give a command such as "!searchuser ?razy*" and list all users that match the regex. Perhaps the returned information might also contain the registration date and editcount in order to narrow down which user you're looking for.

Obviously, this would have to broken into "pages" to prevent flooding the channel, so the command might take another perimeter, such as page number.

I can see several ways of doing this.

a) download the list of users from the API for every request and downloading many many megabytes of memory.
b) download the list once, and scan the newuser log each time and update the list.
c) use the databases on the toolserver.

Firstly, a) would have me shot at dawn by a lot of people for wasting bandwidth. c) is also not really an option. Yes, it's easy enough to do, at the moment. BUT I'm not wanting to rely on server-specific features - I want this to be usable on almost any server so I can move it around. b) seems to be the only one left, but this is gonna be a pain to do.