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Crash.
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Forum Search suggestion

Post by Crash. »

Greetings,

I don't know if it is possible, but I have a couple suggestions for the search system:

1. Make "Search for all terms" the default
2. Add an option to "Search Topic Title"

I suspect it is less likely that people use "search for any terms". I can't think of many reasons to use this feature. Also, most of the time I can't find the topic I'm looking for since it is impossible to search for titles only. It would seem more useful to have the following:

Search topic title only
Search topic title and message text

Cheers!
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beowuuf
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Post by beowuuf »

I'm afraid gambit stepped down as technical bod, and none of the rest of us have a clue nor the time to look into that sort of thing :(

I actually imagine it's a major pain deep in the code, not a surface change

And I have bad news for you - most people don't create useful titles for their posts. It's probably easier to scan through the forum pages quickly and let the keyword catch your eye that way

Anyway, perhaps one of the other admins can be more help, I have no technical savvy with this stuff
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Gambit37
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Post by Gambit37 »

You don't need "Search topic title" only -- the default search searches titles and messages. If the text isn't found in the message, but it *is* in the title, you will still get a positive search result. Just be more specific with your search terms.

Not sure about the default thing either -- it's just a radio button right below the one that's set. How hard is it to click one extra button? :P

Still, I can do that if other's think it's worth it.

Can't do #2 anyway, without hacking phpBB core and unfortunately I no longer am investing in feature updates to the forum, I have neither the time nor patience. Sorry!

There are a lot of threads around our tortuous upgrade decisions in the past -- you might want to read those to understand why we didn't upgrade to version 3... nightmare software!
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Crash.
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Post by Crash. »

Gambit37 wrote:You don't need "Search topic title" only -- the default search searches titles and messages. If the text isn't found in the message, but it *is* in the title, you will still get a positive search result. Just be more specific with your search terms.
What I am experiencing is a lot of irrelevant search results due to words that are commonly used in message text, no matter how specific I try to be. I would guess that over time, as the number of messages in the forum increases, the accuracy of "any terms" search results will decrease. Often the things I am looking for are in the titles, but I have to wade through a lot of messages that are not at all related to what I'm searching for.
Not sure about the default thing either -- it's just a radio button right below the one that's set. How hard is it to click one extra button? :P
It is not specifically hard, it is just that 90% of the search systems that I use default to all terms (Google) so if I don't remember to click the radio button, the search is wasted, the forum has wasted its processing time, and I have to wait a few seconds before repeating the search correctly. It's just a little thing, but I thought I should mention it in case it was a simple change.

Thanks for your consideration!
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Gambit37
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Post by Gambit37 »

What exactly are you searching for? I can't imagine there's anything DM specific that would be throwing up thousands of unrelated results? How many non-useful results are you getting?
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Crash.
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Post by Crash. »

I search for pretty much anything that I've posted about here, hoping to avoid duplicating threads. It is not as much that I'm getting tons of results, it is that I am not finding what I am looking for - but I know it is here because I eventually find it. I mean to say that the search system is not helping me as much as I like to think it could.

Thanks!
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Gambit37
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Post by Gambit37 »

Can you give me hard examples? I don't know how I can help if I don't know how you're using it. Cheers.

Also -- are you remembering to select a specific forum when searching? Are you using AND, OR and NOT to help limit results? Both features can help significantly.
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zoom
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Post by zoom »

as a sidenote, when you search and found a topic with 8 pages
it does not tell you on which page you will find the result.
Could be i am missing here something..
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Gambit37
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Post by Gambit37 »

I think you have to appreciate that this is free software and unfortunately doesn't do everything you might like it to.

You have to remember that the community is very small and we all have very limited time to devote to maintenance. I certainly don't anymore, that's why I stepped down.

After six years of running and maintaining the software here, I have no further interest in updating it, but I'm more than happy for anyone else to look for / develop solutions to these problems to help make it better, assuming the effort is worth the gain.
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zoom
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Post by zoom »

Somehow I thought my post would help. Now I see it does
the contrary. I really did not want to criticize your work or
the search engine plus what I am good at is being pessimistic/
seening the faults at persons, things, activities. Not the best
of qualities :(

I am glad there is a search function!
I am glad there is this forum, I spend really a lot of time here.

With the search function, I had to learn first how to use it
properly. There are limits to its usefulness, but that is totally ok.
That can be even fun. And if sometimes you don't find what you
seek, you can post a new topic or suchlike/=call for help here
I just thought pointing out the parts where it was not useful
would somehow help others, who might still have to learn about
the search usage to get to results. Anyway, I think all here
really do concious or unconciously value your tending the
forum over the past years gambit.(while I have not witnessed
the whole span it dawns on me what has been accomplished.) :o
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Crash.
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Post by Crash. »

Greetings,

The problem is not specific to this forum. I think it is the phpbb software. There are a handful of forums that I visit which use this software, and on each of them I have trouble finding just what I'm looking for, citing the reasons above. As I mentioned, it isn't a big deal, it is just an annoyance that I was hoping could be rememdied with an edit to a config file or something. Anything more than that, and it is not worth the bother. I think we've spent more time discussing it than I thought it might take to make the change.

I don't specify a forum in many of these searches, since what I'm looking for is often not in just one forum, so many searches would be required. Some of the searches in my cache are monster AND graphics, wallset(s), graphics.dat AND decode, item AND placement, graphics AND list. Additionally, there are some times when I want to review a thread where I remember the title/topic of the thread, but since I can't search for title, I have to come up with some other way of finding the thread.

I think that I can get the desired results by use of the AND operator. Basically, I'm lazy and accustomed to typing a few search terms, where the search engine assumes all terms, and the results are identical to an AND search. I expected this was the most common type of search, and that it would be sensible for that to be the default radio button/search type.

I can say that there are a number of threads that I've started simply because I couldn't find what I was looking for, but where I'm fairly confident the answers had been previously posted elsewhere, such as:

RTC Graphics content and names
Monster Graphics Wanted
Where to find updated graphics for RTC
View windows size or zoom (DMJ)

Of course, this can always be attributed to my aforementioned laziness, but I'm trying to increase the effectiveness of searching to reduce duplicate threads for which people are often criticized on (other) forums in general.

Still, it doesn't really matter and we should all probably get back to making dungeons ;)
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ChristopheF
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Post by ChristopheF »

I agree that the default option did not make any sense.
I have updated the appropriate template file so that "Search for all terms" is now the default option when you make a search.
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Crash.
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Post by Crash. »

Greetings,

Is this a template file/section that you can share? I want to pester some other phpbb forums in case they want to consider the same change.

Thanks for your consideration!
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Gambit37
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Post by Gambit37 »

Thanks Christophe for making the change -- I knew it was simple, I just didn't want to go anywhere near it again... ;-)

@Crash: The template files drive phpBB formatting. They are basically HTML. Anyone who knows what they are doing can edit them with a text editor.
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ChristopheF
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Post by ChristopheF »

Here is the change I made:
I modified the file named templates/subfilver/search_body.tpl and replaced:
<input type="radio" name="search_terms" value="any" checked="checked" /> {L_SEARCH_ANY_TERMS}<br><input type="radio" name="search_terms" value="all" />
by
<input type="radio" name="search_terms" value="any" /> {L_SEARCH_ANY_TERMS}<br><input type="radio" name="search_terms" value="all" checked="checked" />
This change would have to be done in each template installed on the board (we only have one here).
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Crash.
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Post by Crash. »

Thanks very much everyone! I greatly appreciate the time and effort.
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