Howto Search

[lareya]

Okay,
I am trying to search the forums. I find that my results are within a group of posted messages. Is there a way where I can search, and the actual link of the search comes up?  I find it terribly time consuming when I get tons of hits, but when I click on the links I have to read many messages, and sometimes I find the one with the search link on it.  Am I searching wrongly? Is there a way to search and actually go to the keyword within the forum?  Then i can read before and afterwards when i realize it is pertaining to the subject I am trying to find info about.  

Hmm, hope I am making my self more clear than mud here.

lareya

[offroadgeek]

i moved this to the appropriate forum - site suggestions, feedback, and updates

regarding the searches... when you search for a word, it will pull up all the topics that contain that word.  if you click the link for a thread in the search results, it won't bring you to the actual post with the searched word, but to the first post in the thread.  when you look through all the posts in the thread, you will see the word you searched on highlighted.

hope this helps

[Ling]

The bottom line is that the search function is pretty poor by todays standards. The 'AND' function does not seem to be handled correctly. Thus, it is very difficult to narrow the responses to a group of pertinent posts. Further, it does not narrow the 25-page topics to the appropriate page. Part of this problem is created by the overuse of stickies rather than creating appropriate topics. The use of stickies for version/application announcements if fine, but they should be limited so that only the development team can write to them. If there are common problems, they can create a sticky thread for them, not pile every issue with a release into a single thread that takes an hour to read on a dial-up line. I find it pretty frustrating that there are still inconsiderate boobs whose only response is 'use the search' when the search function is really not useful. The best idea that I have seen is to use Google and in the advanced tab, limit the search to this site. I have not tried it yet. The search function (like several others that I have tried) will not let you search for 3-letter words, etc. So when you are trying to find information on VNC or OGM files, that makes it pretty difficult. Coupled that with a broken AND function and it is really frustrating. Good luck.

[offroadgeek]

Ling - it's good to see that you can provide such constructive criticism in a positive way  

I've change the search feature from 'full text' back to 'manual'.  This has enabled once again the ability to search on 3 character words (php, sql, vnc, etc.).  This should make some happy.

Regarding the 25 page pinned threads, I agree with you that it's just silly to see over 200 posts in a thread.  I think we should start splitting up some of these huge thread into smaller, more specific topics.  Take one of the cacko qtopia thread for example... it's probably fine to have the announcement topic pinned... but then have any support topics that related to it split into their own respective threads.

Also, just to let you all know... soon I will be creating a duplicate of these forums, and will upgrade it to the newest version 2.0.  This version has a feature that allows post specific searches, which should be real cool.

Once I get the mirror forum up, I'll post a link so people could help test.

Any other thoughts on this?

[Stubear]

If you change the Result Type radio button to "Show results as posts" then it show you the actual post the word appears in rather than just the Topic the the post that the word appears in - damm I hope that makes sense.

This way you can quickly see if the particular post (and therefore thread) covers your needs.

With respect to the AND problem that Ling mentions - I've never seen that, it appears to work for me. Can you give an example? I just searched fro "Cacko AND keyhelper" and I recieved 2 pages all of which contained both words in the post, although sometimes it included keyhelperconf as a postive for keyhelper.

If I search for "Cacko OR keyhelper" I get 95 pages - seems like the AND works to me.

Stu

[tumnus]

Whatever changes offroadgeek made have also fixed the AND problem... thanks!

Beforehand AND seemed to be treated like OR, but this had only started happening in the last month or 2.

[Ling]

Ling - it's good to see that you can provide such constructive criticism in a positive way 

Ok, I can now search for three-letter words and the AND works. Thanks very much. I also took the suggestion on returning results as posts rather than topics. I am not sure whether it is better or not. I don't understand why some of the posts displayed don't contain the keyword. Oh well..

One thing that I would find useful (and maybe others would as well) would be to improve the username search so that I could exclude posts by username (ie my own). I tried using a -ling but that does not work.

Another suggestion would be that you subdivide Sharp ROMs and create an area for Cacko. Maslosky does as well as anyone to personally respond to questions and concerns, but there are a lot of posts to sift through. I think if there were a seperate area, issues could be addressed in threads rather than having hundreds of posts in each version thread.

Thanks for addressing this. This made me decide it was time for a donation. Happy Labor Day.

[offroadgeek]

If you change the Result Type radio button to "Show results as posts" then it show you the actual post the word appears in rather than just the Topic the the post that the word appears in - damm I hope that makes sense.

makes perfect sense... I'm glad you brought it up... I've seen other forums do this, and I've wondered how it was done (I guess I didn't look at the entire search screen).

I think results as post is MUCH better, so much so that I wonder if that should be made as the default option (people could then change it to thread when they wanted to).

Overall I'm glad to hear that the search feature has gotten better... I was getting worried there. What's the point of a forum with all these great posts and info without the ability to search them?

Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

[Stubear]

One minor thing is that the higlighting of search terms is case-sensitive. The searching isn't, by highlighting is.

In my previous example of searching for "Cacko AND keyhelper" - only "keyhelper" is highlighted, but "Keyhelper", "KeyHelper" and "keyhelper." (note the period at the end of the word!) are found but not higlighted. Probably nothing can be done about this, but it made me question whether AND search was working or not the first time I saw it.

Stu