Concerning the disabled "Search function"

[Padma]

Flak: You could always "subscribe" to the threads you want to be sure to respond to. I do that, and it works fine.

(When I am *through* with a thread, I "unsubscribe", so I don't get further emails, etc. about it. )

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Originally posted by Aphex_Twin
I agree with Lefty, especially the last part, especially if "critical forums" means Off Topic

no, it does not

 

[Flak]

Originally posted by Padma
Flak: You could always "subscribe" to the threads you want to be sure to respond to. I do that, and it works fine.

(When I am *through* with a thread, I "unsubscribe", so I don't get further emails, etc. about it. )

The problem here is that I already am choked with emails. Quality is not so much the problem, it's the quantity. I don't want even more emails choking up my inbox. It's slightly better for me now that I've weaned some or my friends off of replying to group emails with meaningless 'Yeah I agree' kind of stuff. And the Spam blocker my ISP uses is pretty good and getting better. But its still overwhelming at times to wade through everything to get to the important and delete the unimportant.

In my opinion, I shouldn't have to rely on my own email to keep up with anybody's forum. The forum should itself take of this problem. And this forum has responded to its own issues. By turning off search. This could eventually even have a slightly more positive effect by driving some old-timer posters like me off, reducing the traffic even further. That's fine if that's the goal. But I miss being able to have conversations here and being able to keep up. I don't want to be driven off because my posts are effectively 'lost' and conversations have passed me by (especially in Off Topic).

I like the limited time block idea, or the limited searches per time span idea. Why not try them? The worst that could happen is it won't work. That's pretty much happening for me and probably many others right now anyway.

 

[Padma]

I have a similar problem with my email. I have set a filter that simply deletes all the "Somebody replied to your thread" messages.

What I *DO*, is check my USerCP a couple of time a day. Subscribed threads that have been responded to are listed on the bottom right.

 

[Flak]

Well then how about this? Padma, or some moderator, perhaps even Thunderfall, post some ways for people to use this board without having the Search feature. Make it a Sticky in every heavily trafficked forum.

I've never tried using an email filter, but perhaps I'm willing give it a go. I've never used my USerCP in such a way, but perhpas I'm willing learn more about that as well. I can say this definitely. I'd never thought about doing trying what Padma described and it might just help alleviate my frustration and the frustration of many, many others.

If there are other ideas like this, make them a part of this post. I know this may seem an obvious solution to some of you, but most of just want to hit search and find what we're looking for. And we got fairly used to being able to do this over the years. (Can you believe it's been that long?) If that's going to be taken away for good, as it apparently already has been, then if some sort of replacement is possible, let's do it.

I still like the time slot idea or the limited searches ideas. But maybe they aren't so easy to implement(?).


[size=small]By the way, forget about the Yahoo idea. I did a search on Flak site:forums.civfanatcs.com and got ony three results back. One of the results was from over two years ago.[/size]

 

[smalltalk]

Originally posted by FredLC
Considering the sort of discussion I get into, and how careful I am with what I post, being unable to retrive the threads is quite sad,...

I often prepare my longer posts in a text-editor and copy-paste afterwards. So I'm piling up a tiny collection of text-files. (Don't like to write long stuff into the reply box anyway.)


About the search-function: Why not use a stripped down search?

As far as I understand it, what really takes time is a full-text search. Say you search for any post that contains the word "earth", then basically the database system has to open every post and read it. (Or is there a full-text index available?)

A stripped down search-function would for example only allow to search for posts by a certain poster. As the posters are already stored in an indexed table, I guess, the results could be retrieved as fast as viewing some thread.

Some date constraints could ensure, that there are not too much results, say, only the last month would be included by default, or maybe only one year at a time could be viewed.

The idea is to only allow searches against indexed fields and to decrease the possible results by not allowing full searches. ("any Date, any Subforum")

 

[FredLC]

I thought of keeping my texts in my PC as well, but it's not good enough... sometimes the replies are very important, and to be able to reach them is crucial.

As I don't want to download the entire site to my PC, all I can do is hope to see the search re-enabled ASAP...

Regards .