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Caves of Narshe Forums > Comments and Suggestions > Quick search box.


Posted by: Narratorway 26th March 2012 20:40
Ever considered it?

Posted by: Rangers51 26th March 2012 22:34
Sure! For what?

Posted by: Narratorway 27th March 2012 02:25
The forums.

Posted by: Rangers51 27th March 2012 22:03
Well, this is the part of the thread where you usually get irritated with me, but I have to ask, what would you really gain from it? A quick search would do nothing but run the same search as the search page's default for the page from which you instigated the search. For example, if you click the search link from this thread's page, you will be defaulted into searching the Comments forum, whereas if you do it from the main forum landing page, it will search all public forums.

So, sure, that would save you one click per search, assuming you didn't want to change any of those defaults. I can get that does cut the number of clicks in half, and obviously there's some benefit there. When I weigh it against the time cost of setting it up and making sure it lays out properly on all the skins, though, I'm not sure the quantity of forum or specifically search traffic makes it a winning proposition for me. Anyone else got an opinion on it?

Posted by: Narratorway 28th March 2012 03:32
By that logic, why have a fast reply window? Regardless, it was just a suggestion man. That's what this forum section is for...in'it?

Posted by: Kame 28th March 2012 04:08
Do not question the will and vision of the Josh. He knows all.

Posted by: Rangers51 28th March 2012 14:52
First, Kame, your post doesn't really help resolve Narratorway's disappointment in my reply; I don't claim to know all, and yes, that is what this forum is for. Beyond that, I thought the suggestion, even though it was put forth in a total of eight words (including the thread title), deserved a proper response.

It's not a bad suggestion, as most forums do tend to include this nowadays, and we are well aware that, while secure and stable, our forum software does not include some features that later became common. The point of my reply was in no way to imply that it was a bad suggestion or that I didn't want suggestions - I'd hoped that my first reply made that clear, and I think it did, but fair enough if that wasn't the case for everyone.

The point of my reply, was, instead, just to try to explain where I'm coming from on it or similar suggestions. I can try to extrapolate on that a bit more; I'm not sure Narratorway cares to have the discussion, but maybe it's illuminating for others, I dunno. In this case:
  • We have a working search, it's just not as convenient as the suggestion would be for some people.
  • We have two ways of doing something like this. One is to simply get new forums, which does sound simple but would take a good couple hundred hours' work, and I'm sure that's not what anyone would suggest. The second is to build it ourselves, which would probably take a tenth as much time including all the testing that would be needed.
  • While we are making faster progress on the current backlog of CoN work now that FF5 is done, we still have a half-dozen people working on various things that were planned years ago, and it's inefficient to stop that progress to pick something else up immediately.
  • We'd give precedence to forum work that would help increase or at least maintain forum traffic, and, again, while a quick search is a nice piece of functionality, it wouldn't meet that goal, so we'll consider further as soon as we can get through some higher-priority work.

I'll try once more to make this clear: this wall of text is not a way of saying to take your suggestion and shove it, and that goes out to Narratorway or anyone else who might have a suggestion. This is intended to do the exact opposite, in fact: just because we don't immediately leap on your suggestion and start writing code, doesn't mean that it's not a good idea - it just means that we can't make promises about timelines or anything else.

Posted by: Neal 28th March 2012 15:51
I would actually use a search bar on the main page of the forums, somewhere up in the top right. Typically when I use the search function, it's not just "one extra click" - the most common thing I do is change the settings to All Forums, Any Date, and I search by keyword. I imagine that's likely to be the case for most people who would utilize a quick search bar. That's not to say that the current search functionality is inadequate, it's just a little clunky to get it to where I personally feel the defaults should be.

Posted by: Rangers51 28th March 2012 16:36
Yeah, we'd definitely have to pick the right sort of defaults to make something like that work. Add in a research task to the dev time. biggrin.gif

Posted by: Narratorway 28th March 2012 19:07
Quote (Neal @ 28th March 2012 08:51)
I would actually use a search bar on the main page of the forums, somewhere up in the top right.

As I've seen it implemented in other forums I frequent - quite conveniently, so I would suggest it here as well - there's a quick search box always present regardless of where you are in the forums, but the search parameters adjust to that location.

i.e. As Neal said, a quick search box done from the main forum page searches all the forums, but the quick search box shown while viewing a specific thread only searches that thread and so forth and so on.

And I'd recommend removing any time constraints for the quick search box if you do decide to implement it at some point. I'm honestly confused why you'd have any time constraints applied to searching at all.

Posted by: Tiddles 29th March 2012 18:29
Quote (Narratorway @ 28th March 2012 20:07)
I'm honestly confused why you'd have any time constraints applied to searching at all.

Buy a few of Google's server farms for us and we won't make you wait. Promise.

Posted by: Glenn Magus Harvey 29th March 2012 20:48
I think the search feature is fine as is, with the exception that it defaults to searching posts from 30 days and newer. If that were changed to "any date", I'd be perfectly happy with the search feature as it is now.

Posted by: Narratorway 30th March 2012 03:17
Quote (Tiddles @ 29th March 2012 11:29)
Buy a few of Google's server farms for us and we won't make you wait.� Promise.

I think you might have misinterpreted what I meant when I said time constraints. I meant...well...
Quote (Glenn Magus Harvey @ 29th March 2012 13:48)
I think the search feature is fine as is, with the exception that it defaults to searching posts from 30 days and newer.� If that were changed to "any date", I'd be perfectly happy with the search feature as it is now.

...that.

Posted by: Tiddles 30th March 2012 18:44
Yes, I skimmed over it and assumed you meant the search timeout. I agree that all the IPB search defaults are stupid and wrong.

Posted by: Rangers51 30th March 2012 19:41
Quote (Tiddles @ 30th March 2012 13:44)
Yes, I skimmed over it and assumed you meant the search timeout. I agree that all the IPB search defaults are stupid and wrong.

I agree that they're stupid and wrong, but I appreciate why they did them from a server load perspective (as does Tiddles, since we'd talked about that very thing quite recently).

Since our site is way too small to really have to worry about the server load generated by search functionality - I certainly hope! - and because you said this was an amenable solution for your suggestion, I changed the forums to default to the "forever" option on the search page. It's live now. Note that this took me at least an hour to find and change, due to the complexity of a forum system and the fact that I really change things under the hood pretty infrequently, so you can imagine why I didn't drop everything to actually do the much larger change of adding the quick search box just yet. smile.gif

Posted by: Glenn Magus Harvey 8th April 2012 16:15
Thank you Rangers51! Now to go on a thread necroing spree!

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