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is there a "similar threads" plugin ?
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you know you have a thread on say, soccer, and below the thread posts it lists ..
Other similar threads
soccer scores this week
footbal players in bustup
etc etc
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It's possible to make this with the Sphinx Search i guess. Otherwise you might now is a functionality when posting in the QnA. But nothing so specific.
I'd love to use such a module too. Especially on the top or bottom in the discussion (post) view. I'd be great to add a module lets say on top delivering 3 similar threads or/and maybe 10 on the bottom.
Could be in kombination with tags or fetching a specific wordlist from the title that could also be administered like the tags in the backend. also with a whitelist or a blacklist. phreak dreaming
I could definitely see this as an extension of tags. It might be trivial...
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Based uniquely on tags it might be trivial, as each tag would be a link to other posts. On the other hand, extracting keywords from the posts would be significantly more complex, especially in terms of fine tuning and improving relevance.
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Be a cool plugin tho
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Start with a simple plugin (wiki pls) finding threads (topic starts) with the same tags, show them in a module.
Doing something with sphinx would be gr8 but maybe maybe performance problems
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Sphinx already has this option.
With new posts, sidebar, and underneath the discussions.
grep is your friend.
I'm not sure if this helps, but I found a thread on WordPress.org talking about this sort've thing using PHP. I'm not sure if this is relevant at all but thought I'd post it here, maybe it gives someone an idea or something? Or it could be nothing even close to what is needed to perform a related threads function.
Whoops, tried copying the code over to here and it displayed all crazy. Does this help at all?
wordpress.org/support/topic/related-posts-not-a-plugin-php-code-mod
Vanilla and WP use different API's you would rather learn PHP and code it or spend eternity recoding a plugin for WP.
The usual "similar thread" plugins for other boards are using MySQLs MATCH AGAINST, which only compares the first posting in a discussion to other first postings. So personally I am no fan of such plugins, because it is way too often that either
So "similar thread" means "similar entry posting" and there is no prediction given to the similarity of the discussion as such.
I don't know anything about Sphinx but if it only compares the first posting too, I think using tags for judging the similarity of discussions would be way more promising, but only if tags are used for comments too - if that is even possible in Vanilla (I haven't used tags yet, sorry)
You can give threads with the simliar tags a heavier "weight" in the ranking. You can do this in sphinx with 2 lines of code or you can write it in PHP. The problem is not "is this possible", but rather "What is the performance hit if...". I haven't looked at MYSQL in a while, so things may have changed, but you should look into
Full Text search. Just use this in a few queries and you'll get what you need, but it will be damn slow....it really depends on the size of your DB and expected delay.You can also apply a few tricks where you only grab the 100 or so most recent threads using plain old MYSQL and THEN do the whole matching on tags/title/etc. Yes it is inaccurate, but you skip the overhead of doing the
LIKE %on every row in your DB. You can then tweak the max number of recent threads fetched based on your hardware for optimal results.Sorry, what I meant was I tried to copy the code to this thread and save anyone curious having to click a link to view it, but it didn't display right. I didn't actually try to use it with Vanilla. I didn't expect it to work directly, just thought it might offer a perspective or possible use if the right person saw it. I'm not a coder, the discussion just seemed relevant.
Thanks so much for the input @R_J and @mcu_hq. I do like the idea of only grabbing the last 100 or so using MYSQL.
I was just really surprised that someone hadn't built a plugin accomplishing this yet. I know it's not for everyone, but for related threads can be pretty useful/engaging. When it's accurate. ;-)
Again, thank you!
This would be a fairly challenging addon to take on. FWIW, yes, I'd base it on Sphinx if I were attempting it. Would be valuable, but a substantial amount of time.