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To Lincoln Todd and the Vanilla folks - The first thing to do after Vaniila 2.1 is released.
... if not before
There are alot of repeat questions on this forum - it can be cut significantly and the frustration level of new as well as seasoned users of the forum could be reduced
1) Add the wiki link to your Documentation pages if you feel it is valid, and if not let us know you don't intend to for some unknown reason.
2) Improve the search function so it can actually find some search terms.
e.g. if I search for "repeat questions" will this link show up in my search.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
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Comments
anyone else vote for the above. let your comments be known if that is the case.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
I would argue that the top priority would be maintaining functionality with existing Vanilla 2 plugins/themes/applications. I would hate to be apart of a open source community with a whole bunch of dead and non-functional addons. Most of the questions on this forum tend to be focused on "this addon used to work with version xxxx, but now it doesn't!" I am really worried about 2.1....
why should they maintain other peoples' plugins?
They should remind people to do it, and make sure the versioning warnings are more strict.
grep is your friend.
They shouldn't maintain 3rd party plugins obviously, but if they want people to develop on Vanilla, it would make sense that they don't change their "framework" often enough to hinder a stable environment.
@mcu_hq
I somewhat agree with plugins but with a different slant....
What would be helpful, if lots of plugins break because of a few common problems. It would be great if they provided a "how-to" on what a developer of a plugin would have to do to reamin in compliance and upgrade their plugin. e.g. if an event no longer used or there are deprecations - announce them instead of leaving it in the hands of the plugin developers to ferrret out. ost of the plugins use the same techniques anyway. A clear explanation of using the meta table would also be nice and some new documentation on writing themes, plugins and applications if there are important changes for compliance to 2.1
But simply adding adding the link to the wiki on the documentation wouldn't require a brain surgeon.
and a functional search that finds recent discussions would still be #1 in my opinion.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
You don't have to worry about that. Right now we already have the opportunity to install the applictions / themes / plugins and see if they work with 2.1
Any application / plugin that doesn't work can have a fix, whether it's from the plugin developer or found by the community.
I also was thinking of letting the community 'approve' the plugins and themes (with a little review), once 2.1 comes out. The plugins, themes and applications have to comply with certain 'rules' and then they can be approved.
Rules are : Zipped correctly, used proper coding styles, no errors or serious bugs with 2.1 etc, etc
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so why can't I find this discussion, when i search for repeat questions
does vanilla on this forum use a different search method than is distributes with the software. if so is there some kind of search cache that is not updated. It seems that only old discussions can be found, and not many of them are returned for the search term. Why not just replace the search box with a google search??? Also quite surprising no one else thinks this is important. Is it because no one uses the search feature on this forum.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
At least one of the seasoned users thinks it's important too :-) I just forgot to mention that and I focused on the 'Vanilla 2.1 and plugins' remark from mcu_hq. Yes it's terribly important that we have a good search feature. And yes, I think there's a cache issue with the search feature. I think the discussions are indexed nightly.
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is it just here on vanillaforums.org that the search does not work? in our community it works very well and i always find what i'm looking for.
perhaps the search feature on this forum has been crippled so more people post to ask questions, because they can't find a solution that has already been answered. A way of of improving the number of posts to the board
I would prefer they get rid of sphinx (or fix it) if that is what they are using and have a slower search through innodb that is more thorough. A thorough slow search would be preferable to a faster search that is useless at best.
@underdog - i don't think cache is indexed nightly, because this message still won't show up, or the cache is broken. It would be better to limit search of discussions to recent discussions if size is a problem. I'd much rather get answers for 2012 rather than 2010.
Just trying a few searches I can find nothing more recent then March 2012 - about the same time the upgrade of this forum was done.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
I am certain that they are not using sphinx. I recall reading somewhere on here (can't find it lol) from Lincoln that they use sphinx on their hosted solutions. If that is the case, then I can see why penny arcade's search seems to be pretty good. However, it looks like only the discussion titles are indexed properly....hmmm.
The thing is that MYSQL just really sucks at returning anything meaningful. It is not meant to be used as a search engine. I don't blame the developers for the sub par search results.
Like I said before though, I have been working on a plugin to fix all of these issues. No ETA, but it is close....Here is the repo.
@mcu_hq - I am acutely aware and happy that you are working on the plugin. Would your plugin be used on the vanillaforums.org. Interesting links.
http://blogs.innodb.com/wp/2011/12/innodb-full-text-search-in-mysql-5-6-4/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2638698/mysql-full-text-search-workaround-for-innodb-tables
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1381186/fulltext-search-with-innodb
Until that time it would be nice to replace the current search box that goes through google search for the site or have to search boxes. google search through site and vanilla search. It would also be great if there was an option to search for a term and one more term to search by author. Many times I know the author of the post but paging manually through author's comments is very time consuming to (it would be also nice if the authors comments produce more comments or there was pagination instead of more.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
Just curious - has anybody ever performed a search and got a result that showed a result that was more recent than 3 months old.
aardvark - test line
if nothing changes with the search - my prediction is that the word aarvark will show up in the searches sometime around September 8, 2012 plus or minus a week
anybody else want to venture a guess on when aardvark in this discussion will show up in search?
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
To address (and hopefully alleviate) some concerns:
A lot of themes will need to be reworked for 2.1. In general, we recommend only customizing the default master template and using a custom.css file (not overriding the style.css file). That gives you the best forward-compatibility by far.
Some plugins will break in 2.1, but generally it's just because a few hooks changed (especially those in the discussion templates) and they'll need to be re-targeted. Very little about the framework has changed.
I don't foresee search being re-engineered before 2.1. We do use the Sphinx plugin on some hosted sites, but not by default. It's still an opt-in feature.
thanks for the heads up.
any chance of providing a list of deprecated or invalid hooks.I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
I have, and with a success, like you have probably noticed. But it was not easy and it has just lately come to my knowledge, that I shoud stop that. Sorry especially @UnderDog, I'm those 'ancient' forum users that were taught to always use search before posting a new topic..
But yes, search feature is quite time consuming if not challenging.
Anycase, wanna help with this important @peregnine s test and repost phrase aardvark
Sorry for the off topic, please continue.
yes - the search in google is about the only way to find items that are more recent than 3 months old. But... not within the standard vanilla search box on this forum, in my experiments. @Sheila What have you "searched for" on this forum and found that is less than 3 months old, or am I confused with your answer.
aardvark
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:vanillaforums.org+aardvark
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
Haha, my bad once again. Busy day at work, language barrier & other related bad excuses. I understood it totally the other way around.
But I do think the search somewhat fails also on old topics; Paging at the top -topic is my recent achievement. I think it took me hours to find it in a first place (no, didn't favourite or bookmark it then) and especially to find it again, when I wanted to post own issue related to that.
Anycase back to the most important matter: aardvark. Only an hour ago, I though that's just a random line of letters but no, it's Maasika.
We moved the database to another server at the end of March 2012 and missed updating the Sphinx indexer so that's why the search is out of wack.
Unfortunately, search is quite a tough problem. I keep doing research on how to make it better and keep hitting roadblocks.
wait....you guys use sphinx on the the main site here? If that is so then the results should be much much better than what it returns currently.