Forum Search Feature

[image2x]

Two quick gripes concerning the forum search functionality:

1) Is there a way to disable the mandatory wait period between searches when it's from a registered user? I get this all the time whether due to needing to correct a misspelled search term or even in just paging thorough search results. It's just plain annoying.

2) Is there really no way to do a full string search? A search on "feed all" (enclosed in quotes or single quotes) will return any article with both feed and all somewhere in the text but not adjacent.

Thanks,
-- John

[LoadzaGrunt]

^ +1

[Alan Kirk]

We're looking at it, but bear in mind that the Admins are scattered around the globe and that a significant number of them are well beyond the end of the working day. They won't even see this until (their) tomorrow, and it's not something that's urgent enough for the ones on the bit of the globe where the sun is shining to start making unilateral changes to the system.

[Martin Ryan]

I've reduced the flood timeout to 5 seconds for registered users and changed the search methodology in the back end to mysql, rather than native phpBB which allows exact phrase searching. Unfortunately this means search terms must be a minimum of four characters long. This may be a problem if people are searching for things like three letter acronyms.

Please feed back on how the new method is working. If the four character minimum proves more of a limitation than the exact phrase searching then we may need to switch back.

phpBB appear to be working on getting exact phrase searching into the native system so hopefully we'll be able to have the best of both worlds at some stage in the future.

Martin

[image2x]

Thanks gentlemen! I had no expectation of such a quick turnaround (it's been a pet peeve of mine for months -- I should have posted sooner!)...

phpBB is so widely used and mature that I'm amazed it's default behavior doesn't support full string searches.

-- John

[Martin Ryan]

Yeah, it was a bugbear of mine too, but as no-one else appeared to be bothered I left it. Thanks for bringing it up.

I've added a Google custom search feature at the bottom of the page now too. I tried to get it up the top, but it took up too much room or just looked messy, especially when it showed the results.

There's also a standalone page which might suit some people better than scrolling to the bottom of the page.

I've left the normal phpBB search function in place as most users wouldn't think to look at the bottom of the page for a search function.

Martin

[Martin Ryan]

After a bit of Javascripting brush up, I've worked out how to pass search terms, so if you wish to link other people to the search you've done, provide a link of the form customSearch.php?q=searchTerm where "searchTerm" is the word or phrase you're looking for.

E.g. customSearch.php?q="tm1 tools" for an exact phrase search or customSearch.php?q=tm1 tools for a non-exact phrase search.

[image2x]

Nice work Martin! Thanks.

[ItsPat]

Awesome, thanks guys.