Slitherine

Did the search function disappear off of this forum? I can't seem to find it anymore. The only time it shows up is when I am looking at individual messages, and then it doesn't work at all. Is it just now somewhere non-obvious where I can't find it?

Thanks

Peter C

See this thread Peter with a workaround from Madaxeman.

Rob

Robert241167 wrote:See this thread Peter with a workaround from Madaxeman.

Rob

I'm sorry, but what thread is that?

Peter C

Sorry, good point !!

viewtopic.php?t=14125

Rob

It's a poor workaround to being able to search a specific forum or sub-forum since each forum thread is numerically identified and google can search only by slitherine.com/forum, which covers ALL forums, and the same search terms pop up in slitherine's computer game forums. It makes it so much harder to find old army design threads and threads on particular rules issues that in most cases I stopped bothering trying to use searches to find past threads that respond to questions.

MikeK wrote:It's a poor workaround to being able to search a specific forum or sub-forum since each forum thread is numerically identified and google can search only by slitherine.com/forum, which covers ALL forums, and the same search terms pop up in slitherine's computer game forums. It makes it so much harder to find old army design threads and threads on particular rules issues that in most cases I stopped bothering trying to use searches to find past threads that respond to questions.

Same. Most unfortunate.

What's more disappointing is that a private forum like TMP http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/index.mv with 181 message boards, and 2,376,876 total messages can manage an in-house search engine, but a commercial company which makes a profit from our purchasing their product can't.

True, TMP isn't as pretty and doesn't support emoticons or fancy avatars or 'levels' but then all I suspect most wargamers want is the ability to search for old discussions.

Pete

The problem is the server is so busy it cannot cope with you all. Until we work out a solution we have to disable it or you can bring the site down!

Server load is a function of the amount data it is expected to process.

I suspect you could save buckets of server load if you eliminated the fancy avatars and 'ranks'.

Maybe even move the wargames board to a different server from the comp game boards.

Otherwise there is only one solution - buy a better/another server.

Pete

What's more disappointing is that a private forum like TMP http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/index.mv with 181 message boards, and 2,376,876 total messages can manage an in-house search engine

add:

,which does not work properly

TMP may have the odd glitch, but 90% of the time it works fine.

Certainly this morning it worked 2/2 tries for me, while the FOG forum works 0/1,000,000 tries - because it doesn't have one.

Which would you rather have - Fancy but not working or plain but functional ?

Pete

TMP isn't functional.
It only returns queries with very few hits. In fact, one can only search topics, not message bodies, because this would nearly always result in timeouts.

I would prefer a working search function, which this forum had for a very long time and certainly will have again soon.
Until that, I'll use the workaround (which works as good as TMP's, if not better) and try not to complain too much.

The forum is run by open-source software called phpBB (which is very popular).

To have search, you need to do what's called "indexing"... basically like a very complicated book index, which lists where words are. This does speed-up search considerably... otherwise a search would have to look through all the text every time.

But it still takes time to search on an index, and the bigger the forum gets, the longer it takes. To use the book analogy again, an index for a 100 page book is a lot quicker to use than one for a 10 000 page book!

With more and more users and more and more searches, eventually the server (computer) running the the forum runs out of computing power; made worse by trying to do so many things at once. Think about how bad Windows is when it starts. Same thing...

There are ways of improving performance, but like tuning a car to perfection, it's not easy. But I'm sure they are looking at the problem. Google supposedly has hundreds of thousands of computers running in parallel to do search. I doubt Slitherine does

Well one daring solution might be to move the FoG forum to a server of it's own, payed for by donations from the community (of course Slitherine would then have to pay for advertising here ). That way you remove the load of the other subforums (and I suppose the slitherine HP, etc.) from the equation and can also try for a more powerful server.

A less radical approach would be to include a customized Google search box for the forum (I'm not sure on Googles terms however as this forum is basically a commercial one due to Slitherine also using it for development and customer support issues).

Ghaznavid wrote:A less radical approach would be to include a customized Google search box for the forum (I'm not sure on Googles terms however as this forum is basically a commercial one due to Slitherine also using it for development and customer support issues).

The key is the ability to discriminate among sub-forums in searching the thread IDs which appear to be simply sequental numbers based on the date and time of the first post in the thread.

The forum software does this internally when it sorts threads into different forums. Is there some kind of sub-forum identifier in each post html page that could be noted in a thread like this and could be included as a search term in Google in order to narrow the search?

The avatars and graphcis are not an issue - it takes as long to load bad graphcis as good ones. We have no intentions of moving the forum elsewhere. This is where it needs to be for numerous reasons.

I really dont like the way TMP forums work - I find them very hard to navigate. I guess its just personal taste

MikeK wrote:

Ghaznavid wrote:A less radical approach would be to include a customized Google search box for the forum (I'm not sure on Googles terms however as this forum is basically a commercial one due to Slitherine also using it for development and customer support issues).

The key is the ability to discriminate among sub-forums in searching the thread IDs which appear to be simply sequental numbers based on the date and time of the first post in the thread.

The forum software does this internally when it sorts threads into different forums. Is there some kind of sub-forum identifier in each post html page that could be noted in a thread like this and could be included as a search term in Google in order to narrow the search?

That should be possible, although phpBB should also have the option to run in search engine friendly mode (i.e. using the titles of the sub-forum or entry post as page reference instead of a number string), but then that would probably increase the server load again, if only very slightly.

Ghaznavid wrote:That should be possible, although phpBB should also have the option to run in search engine friendly mode (i.e. using the titles of the sub-forum or entry post as page reference instead of a number string), but then that would probably increase the server load again, if only very slightly.

That would be nice. If it is a search of Google's index system, doesn't mitigate server load here?