Searching

[KenS]

I've run into a couple of problems with searching I want to mention.  None are critical, but all are irritating.

 

1. Search terms less than four characters are silently dropped (unless you end up with none, then you get a warning). Two problems here:

a. it would be nice to know that the terms were dropped.

b. a "character" includes one Kanji symbol, which means it's impossible to search on many common Japanese words.

 

2. Search by author doesn't validate the author name (there are other places where entering a name triggers a pop-up to ensure you select a valid name).  So if you're searching by a typo'd name ("cten04" for "cteno4") it just silently fails to find anything.

 

3. It would be nice (feature request) to have the ability to search for "threads created by...NAME" or for "posts by...NAME" rather than just "anything by...NAME".

[Martijn Meerts]

The problem with setting a lower word length limit, is that searching for for example 'with a blue stripe' would find every word with 'a' in it. I have set the minimum word length to 1 for the moment, we'll have to see what that does to performance.

 

For the other 2 I'll have to see if there are add ons that fix that. I don't know why the system doesn't validate usernames when searching for author while it does in other places, seems like a strange decision by the devs...

[KenS]

I don't know how much work it would be, but one way to allow short queries while still filtering out common noise would be a table of things to block (i.e., a blacklist) containing every single letter, number and punctuation symbol, plus some common English prepositions and similar, so "the quick brown fox and bear use DCC in 東京" filters down to "quick brown fox bear use DCC 東京" rather than (as originally) "quick brown bear".

[Martijn Meerts]

Unless the software supports it by default, or there's an add-on for it, it's going to be a lot of work (I'd have to write my own add-on, but I have to figure out how to do that first :))

[CaptOblivious]

Maybe we should look into using this: http://sphinxsearch.com/ it is supported by our software.

[Martijn Meerts]

Sphinx won't make much of a difference, other than making full text searches faster. You still get the same problem with the minimum length of a search term etc.