Site News Site search now working!

Discussion in 'Community News & Projects' started by Misty, Feb 20, 2014.

  1. Misty gimme kiss

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    A few of our resident night owls may have noticed that the site was just down for a little less than two hours. I apologize for not announcing the downtime in advance, but as it was fairly short and during an off-peak time, I thought I could get away with it. ;)

    As many of you are probably aware, our site search has been very picky lately -- when it even works. We've been using a very inefficient method (for large boards, at least) for searching the database up until this point. Tonight I installed XenForo's Enhanced Search add-on, which is made for boards around our size.

    I won't get into the technical details here, and instead put it quite simply: the site search is now blazing fast. Not only will it encompass everything posted on the site -- threads, posts, profile posts, and our video portal -- dating back to the beginning of time, but it'll do it in a matter of milliseconds. It's also a lot smarter now, allowing you to search words of two characters or more, but also searching the roots of words (ex. searching "testing" will also return results for "test," "tests," "tested," and so on).

    Don't use the search? That's cool. You still get a nice benefit from this. Because we're using a much more efficient method of searching the database, the load on our server will be significantly decreased. Basically, less of the server's resources will be used for searching, and more for loading quickly and without problems!

    I'll be watching our load times and server errors closely over the next few days to make sure everything is working properly. Otherwise, thanks for your patience and give the search a try!

     
  2. Amaury Legendary Hero

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    When I try to search for threads I or others have started in a forum, I get the "No results found" overlay, and, ironically enough, I was able to do that back when we were on XenForo 1.1, where I kept having to try again and again to search.

    My specific settings for searching are as follows:
    Search.png
     
  3. Misty gimme kiss

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    It's a persistent bug with XenForo, sort of. It's actually not really a bug as much as confusing wording. If you uncheck Display results as threads it will work fine.
     
  4. Amaury Legendary Hero

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    Works great!

    And yeah, I remember Andy's report on that (I posted in the thread). What I find weird is that Mike hid Search threads started by this member only and not Display results as threads.
     
  5. Meilin Lee RPG (Red Panda Girl)

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    Finally! Search has been a pain in the @ss for too long
     
  6. Misty gimme kiss

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    It really has been, it's been broken since we moved to vB4... In 2010. I'm trying to adjust to a world where I don't need to use Google to search this site.
     
  7. Amaury Legendary Hero

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    Misty, thank you so much for your constant hard work and dedication to the site. I'm sure I speak for everyone here when I say that's it's greatly appreciated and while not all of us adjust well to change, such as new styles, we do eventually, and I personally believe that counts for something.

    As for the search, I never realized it was broken on vBulletin.
     
  8. What? 『 music is freedom 』

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    Huzzah for being a win-win!
    Amusingly enough, I feel the more efficient searching system may just very well be an incentive for people to increase their usage of the search function in general. I hope that every member maximizes this as much as they can.
     
  9. Amaury Legendary Hero

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    Some search results, at least pertaining to profile posts, still appear to be missing. For example, I know our conversations, Misty, go back farther than this, as we also talked about the long downtime SEGA Forum had in August 2011 and other stuff.

    Comments.png
     
  10. Misty gimme kiss

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    The search returns a maximum of 200 results (10 pages). If you're looking for things older than that you should refine your search.