Discrepancy in forum thread filtering

Malice

I'm just using the Dispute Resolution forum as an example, it may be happening in others.
Basically if I set the search results as follows I only get one thread:



But if I set them as follows I get a bunch more:



Shouldn't "Beginning" return as many results (if not more) than "Last Year"? It certainly shouldn't return less.

Boards.ie: Paddy

Weird, only seems to happen intermittently.

I'll log this in our bug tracker and get someone to take a look.

Thanks for the report.

Boards.ie: Danny

This isn't really a bug though it would appear that the side effects are most undesireable.

On forums like Afterhours with a high number of threads the code that displays the list of threads is inefficient because it pulls info (e.g. last poster, views etc) for all threads in the forum, even when it's just displaying 20 threads.

To counteract this slowness we use a little date hint, a cutoff point in the past, so we'll only get the info of threads with their last post between now and this cutoff point. This works great for busy forums, cutting load times by 66% on average. It doesn't work too good for forums that aren't busy though, like DRP.

We're looking at doing something for the less busy forums that won't reduce our page-savings on the larger forums, so leave this with us for now. Obviously the busy forums take more priority on the fix

Malice

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

This isn't really a bug though it would appear that the side effects are most undesireable.

I understand that from your perspective it's working as designed but from a user perspective it most definitely is a bug.

Boards.ie: Danny wrote:

On forums like Afterhours with a high number of threads the code that displays the list of threads is inefficient because it pulls info (e.g. last poster, views etc) for all threads in the forum, even when it's just displaying 20 threads.

To counteract this slowness we use a little date hint, a cutoff point in the past, so we'll only get the info of threads with their last post between now and this cutoff point. This works great for busy forums, cutting load times by 66% on average. It doesn't work too good for forums that aren't busy though, like DRP.

Obviously you've got better visibility into the statistics but could the process be inverted so, rather than blindly applying the date filter for every forum, only apply it for the busiest ones?

Boards.ie: Danny wrote:

We're looking at doing something for the less busy forums that won't reduce our page-savings on the larger forums, so leave this with us for now. Obviously the busy forums take more priority on the fix

I appreciate that but, specifically in relation to the Dispute Resolution forum, I (and I'm sure others) periodically need to check what's been done in the past to make sure we're not directly contradicting ourselves or whatever. The point is, as far as I can tell with the filter the way it is, I can only go back to Nov 2010 to review threads. Anything from before then appears to be unavailable. Searching for my username for example in the forum produces no results and if I check my post history there's nothing for the Dispute Resolution forum even though I've obviously posted there.

There is definitely at least one music-related Dispute Resolution thread that I now cannot link to.

Boards.ie: Danny

You can go back through the entire forum history, but you cannot apply any filters that will result in less than 20 posts while doing so or else you'll fall foul of the date hinting. As I said, we are looking into it

I've run a search on the database directly and there are only 4 posts in the DRP forum that have the "Music" prefix, you can see them all when you filter by the last year as per your image above. Resolved disputes have their prefix changed to "Resolved", which means they will no longer appear in your filter. I guess this highlights the need to get search up and running in the DRP forum.

I will log an issue for the search-related bug in addition to reviewing the date hinting procedure. To assist you in the meantime, here are the threads you have posted in.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056434472
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056348115
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056295063
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056169548
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056171558
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056079222
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056032638
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056030648
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056031998

Malice

Thanks for that Danny, now go home, it's seven o'clock!

Boards.ie: Danny

I tweaked the date hinting, this should no longer be an issue. I'll leave this open so you can confirm.

Malice

Boards.ie: Danny wrote: »

I tweaked the date hinting, this should no longer be an issue. I'll leave this open so you can confirm.

Thanks Danny, that looks to be working as expected now.