All you need to know about Pirate-Community

[Steo]

Ah nice

It's nothing major anyway but it was just in case you didn't know about it

[The Jonster]

Steo told me something I find really curious with this update that I like! So apparently clicking on the arrows in a quote will lead one to the posts that have the same ID. So for example the quote in his sig leads to his post in the music thread, which I find really neat.

[Hunchman801]

Yep, there's also a link to the post identifier. Quite handy!

[Steo]

I think the link to the post identifier is really cool too. The way that the quotes lead to the thread means a funny quote in a sig can bring you to a thread where some funny stuff happened

[Hunchman801]

Hi everyone,

We've just deployed a new forum search, based on the Sphinx search engine. The main improvement is obviously the removal of the minimum length of searchable words, which sometimes made retrieving old posts quite an endeavor.

Please have a go at it and let me know what you think. If it's good, we'll keep it, else we'll look into other solutions. Strangely, this phpBB implementation doesn't seem to leverage the features of Sphinx's extended query syntax, but I'll try to find out the reason. In the meantime, there's always Google for that.

Note: a new search engine was deployed on the wiki as well. You can read about it here.

[#Rubber mark#]

Why use Sphinx for the forum and Elasticsearch for the wiki?

[Hunchman801]

I expected that one. Simply for convenience, since phpBB has native support for Sphinx and MediaWiki a stable, production-tested extension for Elasticsearch integration. I wish it could be like caching with Redis used for both but I don't have time to write search drivers at the moment!

[The Jonster]

Whenever I used the search back then(rarely) I noticed there were some generic 3-letter words that would often be ignored in my search (such as “one”, “the”, etc.) which wasn’t so great when I was looking for a post with those words and I come up with posts that hardly matched. It’s definitely become easier to find my posts thanks to the update along with the removal of the minimum, so I like how this update to the forum search is going so far.

[Steo]

I've just tried it and now I can search for the term "fun"

Pretty nice update and makes it much easier to search for old posts

[PluMGMK]

Well, I'm often in a situation where I'd really like this functionality, but now it's here I can't think of a specific case to test it. Well, it's awesome that it's here anyway!

[Steo]

I can tell you that the search function really makes it so much easier to find specific posts than the old one anyway, it can even search for the term "I". The old one was very fussy where not only was it at least 4 letters, but it used to return that certain terms were too common.

[PluMGMK]

Well, I seem to have found a glitch with it yesterday. When I followed the link on my profile to search all my posts, the two most recent ones were missing. It righted itself after a few minutes though…

[Steo]

I noticed that too actually if I post and search within minutes of posting. I wasn't sure if that was normal though.

[PluMGMK]

That didn't happen with the old system, I'm pretty sure. Still, if it's only for a few minutes it's not that big a deal I guess.

[Steo]

I was wondering if they take a few minutes to show up, would a deleted post take a few minutes to disappear from the search too. That probably doesn't make sense that way around though, and even if it did, it's not important either.

[Hunchman801]

Well, I seem to have found a glitch with it yesterday. When I followed the link on my profile to search all my posts, the two most recent ones were missing. It righted itself after a few minutes though…

Yeah, it's not so much a bug as a design choice. The Sphinx index must be updated to show the latest results, and I believe I've set a cron job to take care of this every five minutes. If it turns out to be a problem, I could always increase the frequency and see if it doesn't impact performance too much.

[PluMGMK]

Well, that's okay. I can't really see it being a problem. Just maybe something for us to be aware of.

[Steo]

The only reason it could possibly be a problem, is if you somehow can't find a post you made less than 5 minutes ago.

Even if that was to ever happen, you could find it under "Search user's posts", considering it was literally only posted moments ago. I think 5 minute intervals is all right.

[Hunchman801]

Even if that was to ever happen, you could find it under "Search user's posts", considering it was literally only posted moments ago.

Well, it might still take up to five minutes to show up there, actually.

[Steo]

I didn't think of that, but there's no crazy rush to search for a post that's less than 5 minutes old really. I'm sure that realistically within 5 minutes, the post would still be in the recent posts on the home page.