I thought the words in [brackets] in a thread title were tags?

Zetx

And then I thought I could search by the tag via https://forums.penny-arcade.com/search?adv=1

For example [steam] or [movies] (https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/245843/the-new-and-improved-steam-thread , https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/245864/the-movies-thread-not-the-moovies-thread), but the input shows "no results" for either of those things. So uh, what are the [brackets] for and what are tags (in the context of the search I also tried inputting a username in case it was 'tagged users' but came up with nothing)?

BahamutZERO

They are not actually functional tags as far as I know, just kind of tradition to make the subject of the thread pop out against the more fanciful extended thread titles when scrolling the forum index. I have no idea what the "tags" field in the search page is for.
That said, search should find them as just words in thread titles, but the search function is busted sometimes. Sometimes it works better if you limit a search to a specific subforum. If all else fails the boards are indexed by search engines so you can do a query on google like "site:forums.penny-arcade.com [steam]" and that often works.

I needed anime to post.

the forum search does not work very well, end of statement

Zetx

BahamutZERO wrote: »

They are not actually functional tags as far as I know, just kind of tradition to make the subject of the thread pop out against the more fanciful extended thread titles when scrolling the forum index. I have no idea what the "tags" field in the search page is for.
That said, search should find them as just words in thread titles, but the search function is busted sometimes. Sometimes it works better if you limit a search to a specific subforum. If all else fails the boards are indexed by search engines so you can do a query on google like "site:forums.penny-arcade.com [steam]" and that often works.

Sometimes searches can pull from weird parts of the page. Searching a post vs searching a page of posts I guess? I did do a search in both a search engine and the search function. Was mostly surprised at the non-functional function heh

I needed a gnome to post. wrote: »

the forum search does not work very well, end of statement

Ahaha, well, fair enough.

Thanks you two. Confirmed my suspicions all around, I guess

bwanie

I needed a gnome to post. wrote: »

the forum search does not work very well, end of statement

And that's on a good day.

SmokeStacks

PA's internal forum search is indeed dogshit, but it's free so whatareyougonnado. If you use Google to search the forums you'll generally have much better luck, just add "site:forums.penny-arcade.com" to the end of your query. If you know who made the post you're looking for adding their username seems to help a lot as well.

bwanie

[Achewood]
Dude..
It is such dogshit
[/Achewood]

Seriously for a forum that's so sophisticated the search is a goshdarn joke.

MichaelLC

From what I recall, the redesign that added the brackets was meant as a tagging or meta system, but they turned it off.

There were a couple of threads that got in before they disabled it. Those might all be locked and forgotten by now, though.

Also, fuucch:

BahamutZERO

the ones that look special in the forum index were manually made special highlight tags at some point, there's just a fixed list of words in brackets left over from then it will highlight in titles.