Background: Search has been my land war in Asia for the last 2+ years. Vanilla's default search is admittedly worse than vBulletin's (which we migrated from around that time), which was already pretty bad to begin with. That's because basing search off a MySQL database is, at its core, a shitty solution.
Eventually we built a solution using Sphinx, and then built an Advanced Search feature on top of it, but Sphinx is a separate piece of software than needs to be installed on the server, and then you need a special PHP module, and then you need an extremely user-unfriendly configuration. I waited until we migrated servers to even begin due to our stability issues we were having a year ago. In short, I'd pick the torch back up every few months only to find a new roadblock in my path.
I finally got our host to install the module correctly yesterday; To be frank, there's still a configuration problem involving the continuous indexing of new posts they're still working on. But, close enough. The VP of Ops at Vanilla helped me smooth out the configuration issues today, and now it's deployed to our other sites (NewBuddhist & intoDetroit) as well.
Not quite as epic as the Vanilla migration, but in elapsed time it took nearly as long. .
The "frontpage" search appears to be superbroke at the moment, though - also (promise not trying to piss you off) some sort of uniformity with the search functions would be cool ... bottom of frontpage (bad) top of discussion page (good)...sidebar top? header to the left of your username top?
I love Sphinx. We implemented it a while ago at work for our support ticket system. Changed our search workflow from "start a search, check back in a few minutes if your results are ready" to "Type in search, hit enter, holy shit my results are here before I took a sip of coffee"
Still can't find that article I did like ten years ago about why mobile gaming is awful, It was one of the first non-fiction things I wrote for SM. I want to reference it to show how far mobile gaming has come since then, and point out how right I was about what needed to happen to make the industry work. I think I'm just bad at search.
I noticed that this old one from you doesn't have your byline. If other old articles are missing authors, that could be a factor in making the search fruitless.
NBD.
Comments
YAY!!!!!!!!
I don't know how to deal with this.
... yet. For example, a test query of "post your desk" doesn't return the thread of the same name within the first page of results...
//Edit: disregard. I was checking the search box at the bottom, didn't see the search box at the top.
Footer search nuked.
Background: Search has been my land war in Asia for the last 2+ years. Vanilla's default search is admittedly worse than vBulletin's (which we migrated from around that time), which was already pretty bad to begin with. That's because basing search off a MySQL database is, at its core, a shitty solution.
Eventually we built a solution using Sphinx, and then built an Advanced Search feature on top of it, but Sphinx is a separate piece of software than needs to be installed on the server, and then you need a special PHP module, and then you need an extremely user-unfriendly configuration. I waited until we migrated servers to even begin due to our stability issues we were having a year ago. In short, I'd pick the torch back up every few months only to find a new roadblock in my path.
I finally got our host to install the module correctly yesterday; To be frank, there's still a configuration problem involving the continuous indexing of new posts they're still working on. But, close enough. The VP of Ops at Vanilla helped me smooth out the configuration issues today, and now it's deployed to our other sites (NewBuddhist & intoDetroit) as well.
Not quite as epic as the Vanilla migration, but in elapsed time it took nearly as long.
.
Search works awesome, super pumped.
The "frontpage" search appears to be superbroke at the moment, though - also (promise not trying to piss you off) some sort of uniformity with the search functions would be cool ... bottom of frontpage (bad) top of discussion page (good)...sidebar top? header to the left of your username top?
Our WordPress integration is something I'm thinking a lot about presently. Suffice to say: we're standardizing on the forum search ultimately.
I love Sphinx. We implemented it a while ago at work for our support ticket system. Changed our search workflow from "start a search, check back in a few minutes if your results are ready" to "Type in search, hit enter, holy shit my results are here before I took a sip of coffee"
No more Google searching for:
"icrontic.com" thread keyword
Lincoln you are the best.
I was confused. And then I learned how to Google.
New search is great! My standard index for that is how easily I can find ye olde Icrontic Web Garage.
Your librarian/archivist friends thank you.
cc @GnomeQueen
The "continuous indexing" issue I mentioned above has been fixed.
.
Thanks a lot for reminding me of my shitty past cars!
Still can't find that article I did like ten years ago about why mobile gaming is awful, It was one of the first non-fiction things I wrote for SM. I want to reference it to show how far mobile gaming has come since then, and point out how right I was about what needed to happen to make the industry work. I think I'm just bad at search.
I noticed that this old one from you doesn't have your byline. If other old articles are missing authors, that could be a factor in making the search fruitless.
The WordPress side of things (article text) won't show up in search, yet.
Search isn't working for me at all right now.
Server is dick. Fixt. Let me know if it happens again.
Search is not working at the moment.
Can confirm
Odd. It works fine for me:
Jesus, @Winfrey, clear your notifications! :P
Fuck that shit, those notifications are like how I know I'm not in some kind of fucked up dream world.
Thanks; I'm on it.
I will pay you to fix search .. like .. $20 and an HJ.
Done
I win.
Smalltime
I got to 5 digits before something cleared them when I was on mobile.
TIL @BobbyDigi and @UPSLynx are trying to taken down the webserver through pending notification flood. Don't piss them off, they play the long game.