Why does FORUM search not work properly? [Archive]

edmundfitz

28 Feb 2007, 9:53 AM

If I search for something and return results by post I get the first page of results. If there are more than one page of results and I click on Next or a page number it always tells me no more search topics??

jratcliff

2 Mar 2007, 2:45 PM

Same thing is happening to me. If you click "Next" or on a number, it says there are no more search topics.

JeffHowden

2 Mar 2007, 2:50 PM

Forum expects a post for search results (instead of the standard GET pretty much every other search uses on the planet). The next links not only don't pass any of the search parameters, they also don't POST like the search feature expects.

Yes, it's broken and all around sucks when it comes to search results too (what search feature defaults to an OR search over an AND search, anyway?).

Until we upgrade, which will happen Very Soon Now, use Google and do a site search.

Webnet

2 Mar 2007, 11:14 PM

Speaking of which, what forum software is going to be used?

KimH

3 Mar 2007, 5:10 AM

I hopy that this forum software will be used for the new site and that links to yui-ext.com will be mapped to extjs.com when it is up and running so my links doesn't break! Or at least to keep this site up and running in read-only move for a while... please, Jack! :wink:

Webnet

3 Mar 2007, 6:24 AM

Leaving this site up would split the community and make it confusing. This site will probably be shut down immediately once the new one is launched.

jon.whitcraft

3 Mar 2007, 11:06 AM

I know you all will like the new forum software. Trust me it's miles above where this is software is at.

KimH

3 Mar 2007, 11:12 AM

I can understand if you want to shut down this forum as this has all to do with alpha version. Still... could you please keep it up for just 2-3 weeks after the new forum goes online? Then we have a chance to do something with the links that we currently have as favorites. When the new site is up we can (I hope) find tutorials or documentation for some of the threads that we currently have as bookmarks. Thanks!

Webnet

3 Mar 2007, 9:56 PM

Invision Power Board? Kinda crazy you won't just tell us ^_^

jon.whitcraft

3 Mar 2007, 11:52 PM

Invision Power Board? Kinda crazy you won't just tell us ^_^

Sorry no on IPB...even better..

4 Mar 2007, 10:45 AM

It's a vBulletin Forum. If that is better or not than an Invision Power Board is another war/story.

Why do I know? I was curious and tried the obvious: http://www.extjs.com/forum/

seldon

4 Mar 2007, 11:54 AM

Is it not possbile to fix this search bug in the meantime? Im guessing its a minor bug which costs little time to fix. I would greately appreciate a fix!

thnx,

seldon

tryanDLS

4 Mar 2007, 12:12 PM

jon.whitcraft

7 Mar 2007, 5:41 AM

Unfortunately, it's not a simple fix. Even if the paging problem was fixed, the fact remains that the underlying search mechanism has problems with how it filters common words. In the short term, searching via Google site search returns better results - hopefully the new forum software handles this better. You could also build your own search page on Google Coop to just search this site and the blog. http://www.google.com/coop

Ok guys, I got some good news. Last night i spend a few hours working with Jack on importing the users who have posts and the current forums into the new cms/forums. It's not quite done yet but we are going to be able to at least import the forums and users.

and on the searching front the vBulletin is using a full text search as it is being powered by a mysql 5 database. so searching should dramatically increase.

** Side Note ** the reason we are only doing the users who have posts is becuase that cuts almost 3k of users of out the system of people who have not posted anything on the forums (most of which being spammers)

Thanks and hope this is good news to you all!

humpdi

8 Mar 2007, 3:08 AM

yessss ;)

jack.slocum

8 Mar 2007, 6:44 AM

In the mean-time, check out the search auto complete example. It is live on these forums.

http://www.yui-ext.com/deploy/ext-1.0-alpha3/examples/form/forum-search.html

Jul

19 Mar 2007, 3:18 PM

Just a suggestion... make this thread a sticky OR put a sticky with just the link to this search tool (aka autocomplete example).

I have found myself using this link more and more to search the forums for examples. It's surprisingly fast and very useful.

ChBoc

20 Mar 2007, 2:53 AM

:idea:

With the search example, we can't open a link in a new tab (click wheel in firefox).

Can you change the example to add this? :roll:

thanks

JohnF

2 Apr 2007, 4:13 AM

jack.slocum

2 Apr 2007, 4:59 AM

Hi John,

All the old threads will be in this forum. With this forum, you can also "watch" and "subscribe" to threads to use for bookmarking. It's quite nice. Click on UserCP to see what I mean.

KimH

2 Apr 2007, 5:05 AM

Could you please set the correct HTTP headers and/or meta refresh content so that if you click on a thread from the forum index and then use the browser back-button to go back to the index for the next thread, then the index page is not cached (IE 6 by the way). This worked in the old forum but apparently this new forum has to be refreshed manualle to reflect which posts you have viewed.

It's great that the old posts are in this forum, I was just hoping that the guys implementing this and migrated the old posts would have thought about an automatic redirection from the old URL's to the new ones. It's great that this new forum supports subscribtions etc.... (I will have to look into this) but all my bookmarks for great posts are now wrong and I have to search for the titles and create new bookmarks :((

By the way.... could you replace the new forums smilies with the old ones? These new smilies is so much harder to look at.

jack.slocum

2 Apr 2007, 5:40 AM

Hey I like the new smilies! They are Yahoo IM clones. :)

We are looking at the caching headers. I have also experienced the same oddity.

Unforunately doing a simple redirect doesn't work because the IDs many times don't match up between the systems. I tried to implement it using rewrites with no success.

jon.whitcraft

2 Apr 2007, 6:07 AM

We tried changing the no-cache heads but it added a lot of server load and make the pages not as snappy while loading.

I know it sucks to have to reload but for now that's what's going to have to happen. I will continue to look into this to see if i can figure anything out.

KimH

3 Apr 2007, 4:59 AM

Thanks Jack and Jon,

We tried changing the no-cache heads but it added a lot of server load and make the pages not as snappy while loading.

I know it sucks to have to reload but for now that's what's going to have to happen. I will continue to look into this to see if i can figure anything out.

If you could look into the caching of images too. I feel that this new forum is way slower than the old one. Especially if you have scrolled down in one of the index'es, get into a thread, use the browser back button to get back to the index then the page is at the top until allllllll images are downloaded before it is positionen at where you were (IE).

Regarding the smilies.... I guess I can't make you change them.... so why not position them so that the "happy" smilies is grouped together as well as the coffee-cup/zz-smilie etc.?

jon.whitcraft

3 Apr 2007, 5:22 AM

Kim,

It sounds like your caching setting in IE are not setup right. Both my IE6 and IE7 have no problem displaying scrolling to the bottom and then viewing a thread and then hitting the back button.

I'll look at ordering the smiles for you.

KimH

3 Apr 2007, 5:27 AM

I'm just trying to make this forum better ;)

It sounds like your caching setting in IE are not setup right. Both my IE6 and IE7 have no problem displaying scrolling to the bottom and then viewing a thread and then hitting the back button.
I guess I will have to follow-up on this when my Firefox is back online. I have shut it down because I had like 150 tabs with content needed to be read... so I've - for the moment - been using IE instead 8-|

I'll look at ordering the smiles for you.
Thanks! =D>

soad

3 Apr 2007, 8:37 PM

The fact that VBulletin is powered by MySQL fulltext search capability is good. But it still has some restrictions. I am aware of at least two factors that affect search behavior:

Stopwords

MySQL ignores some general words like "any", "because", "by", etc. So, if you include one of these words don't be surprised not to find them in the search results. Here is (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-stopwords.html) the complete list of stopwords that is installed by default.

In order to change this list one has to reinstall MySQL.

The Min Length of Words to Be Indexed

By default, MySQL indexes only the words that are at least 4 chars in length. It means that words like "Ext", "SQL", "js" are not included in the index and thus are ignored when you include them in search phrases.

Here is (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html) how to fine-tune MySQL search behavior.

jon.whitcraft

4 Apr 2007, 2:59 AM

Yes that is a good suggestion I'll take a look at this to see if there is anything we can do by lowering it to 3 with out affection the speed of the search or increase the load of the server too much.

I'll keep you updated on what i do.

soad

4 Apr 2007, 3:21 AM

That's good news.

jon.whitcraft

4 Apr 2007, 6:32 PM

Unfortunately I am unable to modify the full text parameter as it would take down the server while it rebuilds the full text index. With the release of 1.0 coming up soon we can not allow the forums/site to be down while we change something that really doesn't need to be changed.

As far are the stop words are concerned I don't see them as being problems as most of them are words that even Google ignores, even if Google does does not ignores them, they are really common words that would just clutter up your search results and make it harder for you to find what you are looking for.

Your best bet when it comes to searching would be to refine your search using key words that best describe your problem with which ever component you are using.

I hope this helps.

Jul

6 Apr 2007, 11:25 PM

Jon,

Here is a little bit more input into the current forum's search problems... I was just now trying to search for anything related to svn and building the ext-all.js file. Note that if you put svn and ext-all in for the search, you get no results. I imagine ext-all reduces to "ext" and "all" which are too short at the current settings.

I'm not sure how to search for stuff related to svn. Not enough people use "subversion" these days for that to be an effective search term.

- Jul

soad

7 Apr 2007, 1:40 AM

That's why I was talking about 3-letter-words being included into fulltext index. Some words do matter when you search. E.g. svn, sql, ext, api

brian.moeskau

7 Apr 2007, 1:47 AM

Yeah, i just ran into the "svn" issue myself earlier. I vote for 3-letter search!!

soad

7 Apr 2007, 1:56 AM

It doesn't require to recompile MySQL server. It only needs to add a couple of lines to my.cnf and restart the server. I believe restarting MySQL server is a matter of seconds.

jon.whitcraft

7 Apr 2007, 5:24 AM

Yes it sounds that simple but it has to re generate the full text index which can take a while and that is the problem we are going to run in to. Let me talk to jack today and see if it ok to change it and then shutoff the forum search while it rebuilds the index during a lower peek time in traffic.

i'll keep you updated.