This method used to use a UNION, which would lead to it performing the
same query twice; producing less than ideal performance. Further, in
certain cases ActiveRecord could get confused and mess up the variable
bindings, though it's not clear how/why exactly this happens.
Fortunately we can work around all of this by building some of the WHERE
conditions manually, allowing us to use a simple OR statement to get all
the data we want without any of the above problems.
Robert Speicher