Search Features Bug

[superdave]

I use to be able to use the 'Search this Forum' for eg: '70-200' and it would return a number of 70-200 lenses for sale under the buy & sell section.... however, it shows no match now even though there are such items for sale. Please check.

[reflecx]

I agree, search is definitely broken, now * doesn't work at all

[Tsangstudios]

Hi Moderator can something be done about the search. Its definately not working. Probably why nobody looking at my exteremly well priced 20d heh heh

[Darren]

We are working the issue(s) and will come up with fix or workaround as soon as possible.

[Darren]

We are still exploring the search options that we have, but for now, members should use the Advanced Search function to search for the relevant threads in Buy & Sell.

See http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147156

[wind30]

I tried and it still does not work. Try searching for "olympus" in the titles (advanced search), and do a little browsing of the B&S forum and you will find that it misses out on quite a number of threads.

Just thought to give a little feedback so maybe can improve.

[reflecx]

Search has not been working properly for more than a week already.

Searching on "Nikon" only returns 112 results.

Search for "Niko*" returns 6 results.

[Jason Ho]

We are working on a few issues right now. One of them is the server slowness issue. the other is search. Thanks for informing us. We are looking into it and we have no estimated date on when it will be fixed.

[superdave]

Advance search also does not work for searching "70-200" in both title and body

[Jason Ho]

I have combined all search issues posts into one thread so that everyone including the Admins will get better view on the issues posted.

We have taken note of the issue and we are looking into it. From now on, if anyone will like to help out with providing more information on the search issues that you face, please provide detailed information on your search attempt. Do not just post something as simple as "Search does not work", "Search is buggy", "Search is useless". These does NOT help us to understand the actual problem that you are facing. And you bet that it doesnt help to accelerate the fix solution.

If you like to report a search findings, please provide the following :

1) Search Key AND/OR User name
2) Search Entire post or Search title only
3) Find thread with At Least ___ replies
4) Find Post from <Data>
5) Sorts Results by
4) Show Results as Threads/Posts
5) Search Type
6) Search in which forum.

Beside all these, do share your findings such as

eg theres a post with "xxxx" on the recent postings (date) but its not reflected in the page

eg Based on the same search key but different search options (indiciate the difference), one gives results that is not available on another

eg. Based on the search key, you expecting to see certain results but its not appearing in the hit list

etc...

Please understand we do NOT have fulltime people working on this issues. Morever we also have other issues to tackle. So the more information and findings you can provide, the more it will help us .

Thanks

[Parchiao]

Let me try. I noticed the same thing a few days back.

I did a search using the word "Pentax", default search options and no adjustments were made. Did not see these posts.

http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=148121
http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147347
http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147344
http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147340

[Darren]

Originally Posted by Parchiao Let me try. I noticed the same thing a few days back. I did a search using the word "Pentax", default search options and no adjustments were made. Did not see these posts. http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=148121 http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147347 http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147344 http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147340

Try with the following options set in the Advanced Search dialog box-

Key Word(s) - Pentax
Find posts from - 2 weeks ago
Search in Forums(s) - highlight Buy & Sell forum only

All the four threads you mentioned are listed in the search results.

For even more accurate searches, you can try searching just the Thread Titles (set under the keywords), and based on our testing, limiting the search to 30 days, 60 days or shorter yields the most relevant results. Putting two keywords eg Lens Pentax in the keyword box tightens the search further.

Please bear with us while we work the intricacies of this upgraded search engine which is definitely faster than the old way of searching, but it has its own quirks and needs a bit more work/understanding on the part of the user.

[superdave]

Originally Posted by Jason Ho Please understand we do NOT have fulltime people working on this issues. Morever we also have other issues to tackle.

Er... ok. I hope I didn't sound like I was being pushy. I just wanted to highlight a bug I found, considering that it was working fine before.

[Jason Ho]

Originally Posted by superdave Er... ok. I hope I didn't sound like I was being pushy. I just wanted to highlight a bug I found, considering that it was working fine before.

Nope you didnt Just that we appreciate people to post more details of errors that can help us more. It was a bug that we wont have taken notice if people dont report. So we do appreciate problem reporting (without those emotional and the right tone).

I want to make it clear that I never doubt anyone intention of trying to help us when they report bug or issue. But some people just sounded in a very unforgiving tone and as if we owe them a living. The wrong choice of words and highlighting words in uppercase are some examples. Perhaps some people just didnt know typing words in uppercase is as good as shouting to people who read it.

[HOCL]

yup ... can't search a thing at all .... at both Navigation Bar drop-down Search box, as well as Forum/thread drop-down Search box ....

[Cactus jACK]

advance search in B&S (all options as default, only enter key words searching from B&S).

- boolean "search type" missing from options (bottom left of advance search box http://forums.clubsnap.org/showthread.php?t=147156)
- 3 characters or less (e.g. D2x, F5) search always returns "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

understand that entering less than 3 characters can often not be too productive as there may be too many returns, but without the boolean "and" search, entering "WTS Nikon D2x" returns a bunch of threads (not all) with "WTS" or "Nikon" or "D2x", where i would like to have all results with "WTS" and "Nikon" and "D2x".

i tried to search the FAQs for min number of search characters, boolean search operators, etc, but could not find anything... so pls don't flame me!!

[pianodancer]

Perhaps I may attempt to share some light.

In order for the search to work efficiently, the web server caches the forum in a database which only updates occasionally. Therefore, some of the recent posts will not show up when you do a search.

Using the search feature on a web application like forums exerts a lot of processing power on the server. I suspect the recent increased downtime on CS is caused by the search module, which is now being taken down to improve performance.

[Drudkh]

the search feature has now been resurrected.

[Tsangstudios]

Hi administrator can I find out what database is this forum using?
Basically the search funtion nomater how I attempt it, I do not get the results I want.
Is it possible to restore the previous search codes and the tune the database itself?

If the database is suffering performacne issues, it may simply need indexing to fields which are searched. This will prefvent full tables scans which consume resources.

Eg in a typical statment select * from buysell where title like '%70-200%';
if an index is created on the title column the search should improve dramatically.
If there is already an index the index could be rebbuilt.
If the index has been recently rebuilt, then perhaps a houskeeping of old records is needed.
perhpas delete from buysell where create_date < todate('dd-mm-yyyy',dd-mm-yyyy);
The will probably redue the load cause I think search is most used probably in buy sell.
Hope my suggestions help.

Regards
Kenneth

[Jason Ho]

I will now share some lights on what has happened in the last 1-2 weeks regarding the search issues faced by all users

- VBB forum software was recently upgraded. With the upgrade, the new version software changes the way searches are done.

- With the change in search function, it introduces 2 new issues :

1) our current database (mysql) server load has significantly increased and it affects the forum performance especially at our forum peak hours (9pm-12 midnite). The server impact is as great as 80% increase from the previous version.

2) The accuracy of the search results. The new version introduces 2 different types of searches : Natural Language and Boolean . The results that you will get from both are different. I cant explain why and whats the reason. But I have been told to get the same thing as what we had in the previous version, we have to enable Boolean search type which is currently not available to users.

And fyi, the unavailability of the Boolean search was by default. VBB developers even recommend NOT to turn on because that will further impact the database server load so badly that server will crash every now and then.

Together with the issues above, we also had a increase of traffic (users connection) recently. It was a jump of 15% or more. This of course accelerate the server load issues that we are facing now.

We HAD tried to turn on boolean search feature for every member and I guess everyone now knows the cost of doing that. We had server crash almost every night.

We are currently exploring the option of upgrading the machine but I have no estimated date on when we will do that. Please understand that we arent (and wont) charging members for access here. Server funding comes from a few sources :

- our own Admin pocket
- ClubSNAP gallery and webspace subscription
- Ads and banners (which we just implemented)
- Google ads

And I can share with you folks that not only we arent making money, we sometimes even have to come up with extra to finance the forum and server operations.

We admins are working hard to resolve this issue in the shortest time as we can. Meanwhile I can only ask for one thing from all members : Please bear with us patiently while we are working on getting the thing fixed. Thanks.