Search function seems a bit wonky.

[horseboy]

Shardian pointed out in this thread about custom titles that he just got the new title "I am glad I don't have a title." I wanted to see where this originated, so I did a search (well several, actually)...


--  I am glad I don't have a title  --  (no dice)
--  "I am glad I don't have a title"  --  (nada)

This was actually quoted 2 posts below Shardian's post in the thread I linked to, so the search should have turned it up. I thought the apostrophe might be the problem...

--  I am glad  --  (nil)
--  "I am glad"  --  (nothing)
--  have a title  --  (nope)
--  "have a title"  --  (nihility)

I don't mean that these searches didn't turn up the right results. They didn't turn up a single thread. I finally had to search for "title" by user "shardian" to get any results to show up.

 

[Grasshopper]

Unfortunately, the search function has been flaky since the board started.

[sirwoogie]

horseboy/grasshopper

I just put in a new search engine system and we're shaking out the bugs. The problem we have is with something called 'stopwords' Basically those are words that the engine is supposed to ignore searching on such as 'a' or 'the' What I'm finding is that if a stopword exists, it just pitches all of the results. If I remove the stopword list, we get way to many hits on the results. Most notably is 'to.' This will hit on that word, but also 'took,' 'together,' 'towards' and others. Now imagine that for 'a'

The new engine, while still glitchy, is much better from an infrastructure perspective. It's 10x faster, does phrase searching better than the forum software, and uses absolutely 0% CPU time. For now, I suggest just getting as general term in your search, but use the advanced features to give it more qualifiers. For your case above "glad have title" would get you closer. But, still not close as I think you'd like. I think it'll meet most peoples search needs.

Remember, this isn't google. Speaking of that, Google does pick up much of the forum, but it's not a perfect index either.

Bear with us.

[Chris G]

Is there a way to execute a search for posts by a specific user without populating the "Search for" parameter?

For example, if I try searching the Project Announcements board for "by user" = Level42, where I know there's a post, it just brings the search form up again.  I tried leaving the "Search for" field blank or I tried it with a *.

[sirwoogie]

Is there a way to execute a search for posts by a specific user without populating the "Search for" parameter?

Unfortunately they didn't implement this in the forum software, and it's not exactly trivial to add it either. Sorry! You'll have to add at least a word to search for.

[saint]

You can do it a different way. Click on the user's name to get to their profile, then choose "show the last posts" -- it'll give you every post by that user.

Alternatively, you can search for the letter "e"

Is there a way to execute a search for posts by a specific user without populating the "Search for" parameter?

For example, if I try searching the Project Announcements board for "by user" = Level42, where I know there's a post, it just brings the search form up again.  I tried leaving the "Search for" field blank or I tried it with a *.

[Chris G]

Or maybe I could just PM Cheffo.   

Thanks for the responses.


Chris

[shardian]

So, just wondering...should I report this as stalking to the police?