Board Tracker

dahamsta

I just want to register my utter hatred of the Board Tracker implementation on Boards. An inability to search per-forum, per-user, or anything else more complex than "word", it effectively makes backreferencing and any kind of research on Boards impossible.

I realise that search was killing the site, but there has to be an alternative; a Wikiepedia style appeal, for example, if hardware remains the problem.

It was less frustrating when search was turned off altogether, dangling this PoS over us is like dangling a lollipop over a child's head.

adam

ecksor

I thought you'd gotten sick of us and buzzed off years ago anyway.

Sparky

Ken Shabby wrote:

but there has to be an alternative

There is.
The more of you who subscribe, then the more server power boards can acquire.

VBulletin has always been known to rape a server with its search querys.

There are many forums, many times as big as boards (ie: digitalspy) that still have vB search active, but they have a whole rack of servers for their site.

In the meantime, if your fed up of boardtrackers search, look at one of the stickys at the top of the forum on ways how to search via google.

BoardTracker

An inability to search per-forum, per-user, or anything else more complex than "word", it effectively makes backreferencing and any kind of research on Boards impossible.

There are a number things you should know which can make your searching more effective for example..

The search uses stemming - this means you can search for book and the system will also search for books, booking, booked and any other variation of the word.

You can use wildcards by adding * to any term - for example search for cra* will return results for crash, craig, crass etc.

You can specify exact search terms by enclosing them in quotes like so: "board tracker"

You can specify which terms should NOT be included in results by adding a dash before the word for example.. board -tracker will get all results mentioning 'board', 'boards', 'boarding' etc. but none with 'tracker' in them.

By default the search is ordered by relevance but if you want to see the most recent matching threads you can change the order to 'thread start date'.

If you know a thread or topic was posted/discussed within a certain timeframe, for example in the last week, you can restrict search to only that time which will return much fewer results and then will also likely mean less 'noise' and so you will find what you look for more easily particularly if the term you are searching is one with a large number of matches.

In addition we will be adding search by user to the next version of this search mod for those boards that want it. We may also add the toplevel categories as a search option which can further help refine searches.

dahamsta

None of those resolve the inability to search per-user, or per-board. Sparky, I have no interest in subscribing, although I will make a once-off donation if that is possible, and I know where my money is going. Ecksor, I notice you still think you're witty and interesting, that must be great for you, well done.

adam

FranknFurter

BoardTracker wrote:

In addition we will be adding search by user to the next version of this search mod for those boards that want it. We may also add the toplevel categories as a search option which can further help refine searches.

Wonderful, cant come soon enough imho.
Not being able to search by user has, I must admit, been driving me ab-sol-utely insane.
Somone says somthing like "In my recent post" or "Iv already said" and you go to find said post without having to trawl through hundreds of other posts, you click "find all posts by user" and slap your head when you get the no search screen. argh!

b

seamus

As I best I understand it, the difficulties with search lie in painfully inefficient coding in the vB search engine. You know a lot about vB Adam, I'm sure you've encountered this.
Also, as best I've heard, adding servers is not the way to solve this software bottleneck issue. You also should understand this well, you know your way around a computer. For example, if it takes five servers running full blast to service 1,200 users (at peak), then how do we know that it won't take 15 servers to service 2,400 users - that kind of growth would be unsustainable.

I have no doubt that alternatives are being explored, and everyone's well aware that most people aren't delighted about the board tracker search.

So what do you suggest Adam?

dahamsta

I haven't experienced any problems at all with search seamus, with traffic that runs between a quarter and a half of Boards' (season-dependant); but to be fair my database is about a tenth of the size. I may suffer the same problems as Boards.ie later. I'd be more inclined to think that that's the bottleneck though (the vB coding may be inefficient, but it's not going to be corrected in the medium term) so I guess the solution is to either prune it or cluster it.

Pruning would make it more awkward for users, since they'd have to search archived posts in a different location - deletion shouldn't even be considered - but at least the option would be there for hardcore users, and everyone gets the benefit of "proper" search on, say, the last 1-3 years of posts on the main site. I mean, seriously, how many posts pre-last year are people going to be looking for?

Clustering is only available if the hardware is available, and perhaps that's the route Boards is aiming for. But the problems have been going on for quite some time now, with no (announced) end in sight; and the alternative is just a waste of time. I can't think of a reason why pruning couldn't happen in the interim. Remerges are slow, but not difficult.

adam

ecksor

ecksor wrote:

I thought you'd gotten sick of us and buzzed off years ago anyway.

Ken Shabby wrote:

Ecksor, I notice you still think you're witty and interesting, that must be great for you, well done.

I guess it was just an attention seeking tantrum then?

damien

Sparky-s wrote:

The more of you who subscribe, then the more server power boards can acquire.

Haha you've got to love this bull that the lack of subscribers is the reason. As far as I'm aware Boards Ltd is making money since they don't pay for hosting or traffic and take in enough money in ad revenue and hosted forums to pay for continuous upgrades.

Ken Shabby 2

So your way of dealing with someone that thinks you're a twat is to ban them ecksor? Doesn't say a lot for your self-esteem, old chap. Does oor tiny weenie make oo feel like a liddle man?

Now, what'll I use for my next handle? Hmmm...

adam /pats ecksor on the head

ecksor

See, you get banned originally for a torrent of abuse spewed at everyone who came within your radar and subsequently make a childish nuisance of yourself but instead of admit or face up to that you try to claim that it's my personal vendetta that results in your banning. Get a grip.

Eurorunner

None of those resolve the inability to search per-user, or per-board. Sparky, I have no interest in subscribing, although I will make a once-off donation if that is possible, and I know where my money is going. Ecksor, I notice you still think you're witty and interesting, that must be great for you, well done.

adam

Agree 100%. I suggested as much in a recent thread ie. paying for a proper search facility - but this option was rejected. I just can't for the life of me fathom why.
I wouldnt be too quick to pay for access to an online forum but that just shows how I regard boards.ie
The benefit derived from posting and reading boards has been greatly degraded since the search function was withdrawn. If boards admin could see to it that it was made available on as a paid option, I would have my cc whipped out in rapid time to pay the fee. I'm sure there are many more like me.
In addition, this would not compromise the open public access to boards that boards.ie want to maintain - as all other users could access it as it is at the moment without the search facility.

mike65

So why was Adam banned again?

Mike.

Gone West

he just went mad one week afair

seamus

For the record Eurorunner, subscribers do have access to the original search (afaik), but this is not a permanent thing. So you may feel bitter in a few months' time when the search is reopened to public, after shelling out purely to pay for the search.

BuffyBot

The benefit derived from posting and reading boards has been greatly degraded since the search function was withdrawn.

I wonder how I ever manage to use boards, considering I rarely use the search facility. I wonder what I've missed out on for four years..

The_Minister

I just tried to use the tracker for the first time and nearly put by head through the monitor. I was trying to find a thread on scary things and it's just....gone. That has to be the lamest search engine ever.

scojones

Firespinner wrote:

I just tried to use the tracker for the first time and nearly put by head through the monitor. I was trying to find a thread on scary things and it's just....gone. That has to be the lamest search engine ever.

In fairness, the search engine you wrote is pretty shite. I love that, people who mock something someone created, when they haven't the slightest clue how to make something better.

Vexorg

You cant please all of the people all of the time...

When the searchers do not have cause to complain, its would be those with less patient ones for whom pages do not load quickly enough.

You fix it so that use for the majority is improved, and someone else will be less happy.

If we switch off sigs, tool-tips and smilies to improve performance, there will be cries about how boards is going to ná madraí. How its was so much better in the old days...

Its be a long couple of months before its better.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

throw in my 2 pence, boardtracker is absolutely crap.

muckwarrior

FuzzyLogic wrote:

he just went mad one week afair

Nah, he was always an obnoxious cυnt in my experience.

OT: Didn't know that the proper search was only available to subscribers. I thought it was just there for those who knew where to find it.

ecksor

As mentioned previously, that's only a temporary thing. We don't intend to keep search restricted but for now it is unavoidable.

Nevyn

Sparky-s wrote:

The more of you who subscribe, then the more server power boards can acquire.

What about dropping the cost of subscription for the year to 30 euro ?
Would that bring in enough people to make it a worth while consideration ?

WhiteWashMan

yes, that right, i only paid to use search. please give me my 20 euro back....

muckwarrior

Thaedydal wrote:

What about dropping the cost of subscription for the year to 30 euro ?
Would that bring in enough people to make it a worth while consideration ?

I doubt it tbh. I don't think the cost is a barrier to people subscribing. It's already very reasonable IMO. I'd say there's a minority who want to subscribe but just don't have the means (no CC or whatever) and a majority who just couldn't give a shít and probably wouldn't subscribe even if it was only a fiver a year.

regi

Search will be back when other things are worked out. Subscribers, advertising or money isn't the reason

Faith

BuffyBot wrote:

I wonder how I ever manage to use boards, considering I rarely use the search facility. I wonder what I've missed out on for four years..

This is what I'm wondering!

DeVore

Search will return in the medium (or near) future. Our plan (ok the evil genius who calls himself Regi's plan) is to isolate it on its own server so it doesnt impact on the site. This is complex and requires new hardware and some time time from us. Its in train though...

DeV.

BoardTracker

Firespinner wrote:

I just tried to use the tracker for the first time and nearly put by head through the monitor. I was trying to find a thread on scary things and it's just....gone. That has to be the lamest search engine ever.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/searchbt.php?search=scary+things

Result #1, subject "scary things"

If thats not the 'right' scary things thread then what can I say.. its a search engine, not a mind reader..

One thing to bear in mind is that its a topic search engine designed (like all good search engines) to give the most relevant result for the search term you enter.. if you are looking for a specific thread which you know exists there's no guarantee that it will appear at the top of the list because it depends entirely on how you search for it, it doesn't 'know' what thread you mean and if the keywords you enter are very common it could return thousands of results on a big board like boards.ie.

The 'scary things' thread may be an example of this.. the top result returned is highly relevant, but it may not be the specific 'scary things' topic you had in mind so you would need to add additional keywords or operators to narrow it down.

Try using the various search options I mentioned earlier in this thread to refine searches when looking for a specifc thread.. ie. restrict by date, add negative keywords etc.

One other issue - it only searches threads in public forums - anything in private forums will not be indexed by boardtracker unless requested by the admins.

DeVore

Thanks for the help BT. I hope you guys get the next release out asap because as you can see, user-specific and boards-specific searchs are a major requirement.

DeV.