Searching the forums

#1 The search capabilities on this forum are terrible. I tried using several keywords that I know exist in a previous post but the search results comes up empty. From my point of view (as a Newbie to the Torque engine) this is an absolute must. The lack of adequate searching has just added to my frustration. When I have tried to dig a little further, I think there is a lot of repetitive messages but many of the messages go into different directions so you have to be LUCKY to stumble across the actual message you are trying to find. All of this just adds to the complexity of this site and causes many more than are required. It causes me as a Newbie, to have to rely on the chat or other peoples experience than resolving my dilemma by myself.

#2 I agree with that whole heartedly. Even more important than the frustration factor... there have been so many great contributions from the community that have not yet made even the HEAD version. The problem is, you are relegated to just digging and digging to find them. The search button might as well not even be there because it simply doesn't work.

Please please can you fix this. I know at least a few good web programmers I could recommend (at least one is a GG member).

A good website is essential to drawing people to this engine. Most of what you have is great, but the search is one key element that has to be functional to make an attractive and usefull site.

#3 this is from another post I made, kinda cheezy to quote myself but I am going to anyway

Quote:actually the search as it stands now is BROKEN!

try searching the forums for bullet, then search for decal, then search for bullet decal

that and any other multi-word searches don't do partial word matches as expected.

then try bullethole decal that does not even match anything!!!!

the post in question has the title "adding bullethole decals"

it is a shame that there is so much information on GG that is impossible to find without a herculean effort!

I will add to that, not only is it a heculean effort, in some cases it is downright impossible.

This is not a contrived example, it is a probably the most practical example of why it is taking people so long to get anything done with Torque. It has already started, people posting the same questions that have been answered over and over again.

"Search the forums" is not a valid answer so most people, myself included just don't have the time to answer the same things dozens of times a month and are NOT going to response to this wave of duplicate questions.

#4 I believe this could have been avoided if instead of "re-inventing the wheel" they would have started from a standard forum package and modified it from there. No full text searching just plain sucks.

#5 Got nothing to do with the forum software, the SQL server just can't handle the load. Full text search will come now that the new servers are being installed.

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=3867

Now quit yer bellyachin' and get back to writing games!

#6 Trust me, I would love nothing more than to "get back writing games". I haven't gotten a good compile yet of the engine but that IS my fault, but taking so long to get answers to to questions from "searching" these previous posts is driving me nuts. I don't want to bother these more experienced people with such trival questions.

Hey, thanks for all of the good input people.

- Russ
(anxioulsy looking forward to my first good compile)

#7 Good news, good news indeed.

#8 Thought this topic was worthy of a bump... ;)

With a point I made earlier:

Quote:
What about making the posts available for download by sdk owners? That way we can do the searches on our hardware. This is a very important feature.

#9 Please put the forum members Icon under their name, in each of their posts.

#10 I wrote some scripts to download the entire GG forums archive, and search that archive for the text I want, and spits out a html list of links to thg GG forums posts that hit. Infortunately I get a lot of unwanted hits from the sidebar texts and such. The other slight problem is: I have to re-download the entire GG archive every now and again. I've been able to get a *lot* more out of the forums like this.

I dont think this strategy will scale to the entire community very well.

#11 Definitely not. Hopefully Rick'll be able to upgrade the servers soon so that this becomes a non-issue.

#12 Not really on topic, but...try searching for something with "?" in it... is this a bug? Or is it some kind of joke?

#13 > I dont think this strategy will
> scale to the entire community
> very well.

If i was actively developing with the Torque engine i really wouldn't care... i'd just want reasonable access to the great information on these forums. If i have to archive the entire forum content once every couple of weeks to help me get my product done then that's what i'll do.

Maybe GGs can save themselves some bandwidth by updating a zip with all the forum content once a week or so. Or maybe just fix the search script?

#14 Well I found this post OK, hahaha.

We bought Torque the other day and afterwards I discovered this serious limitation in finding useful forum info. We released a title last year done in A5 and during development used their forum all the time. 9 times out of 10 we found exactly what we needed within a minute or so. I wish I could say the same for this forum. :)

#15 It appears to me that the
search *is* indexing, but only on the TITLE, contents don't seem to be available.

Perhaps it's time to require a naming convention from the community for interesting threads.

Alternatively, some freely downloadable perl scripts may resolve this situation with more ease.

#16 Still doesn't searcht the TITLES correctly/consistantly either.

#17 I wonder if GG would be willing to sell a backup of their SQL server with the forum posts? I'm sure it would be under 650meg compressed (pureley text), to fit on one CD?

I'm sure most of use would be willing to spend $30-$50 (more?) for a one time copy, or $50-$100 for a yearly subscription (monthly or quarterly updates?).

A simple GUI front end could be written over a weekend using VB or PHP/ASP that would allow full text searching (no worries if it's all local).

Disregarding that, I wonder how much trouble it would be to just fix the search to allow multiple keywords from the Title? I think everyone agrees a full text search of the Body of messages would be ideal, but I can relate to having SQL Server buckle under stress. More CPU or memory means more $$ now, so I can see how that might not be an option.

Thanks,
Nerseus

#18 Has there been any thought to this recently? I have been a GG member since a year before Torque was released and I am still waiting for decent forum search functionality. At least let us keyword search topics.

#19 Read THIS

Thaks again Rick O

#20 Check out Rick's latest plan. :)