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You Sunk My Ego-Search!
naporeon
Seattle, WARegistered User regular
Seattle, WARegistered User regular
So, uhhh...yeah. This is embarrassing, but I guess I might as well be straight-up about it. When did we change our character minimum for the search function?
I used to be able to ego-search using "nap*"; either we used to have a three-character minimum, or that wild-card asterisk was counting as a fourth character.
I assume that our index was just getting unwieldy. So, were our search times getting disagreeably long, or was it a matter of space? Or both? Or alternatively, am I just on crack?
Oh, and lastly, is there any chance that this was a temporary move?
Didn't think so.
I used to be able to ego-search using "nap*"; either we used to have a three-character minimum, or that wild-card asterisk was counting as a fourth character.
I assume that our index was just getting unwieldy. So, were our search times getting disagreeably long, or was it a matter of space? Or both? Or alternatively, am I just on crack?
Oh, and lastly, is there any chance that this was a temporary move?
Didn't think so.
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Search times were routinely getting into the 30+ second range, and that is a problem.
I do expect it to be a temporary move.
So you're the guy to blame for all slowdowns.
Errrrrr...perhaps. Look, it's like this, see...I...uhhhh...well...I don't post as much as I used to, and a lot of my Seattle friends post here, so I like to check to see if there are plans being made for lunch, or, say, to watch Weaver get drunk and try to BBQ.
Also, I thought for a moment that I'd made the "your/you're" gaffe. Phew.
Twitter | Facebook | Tumblr | Last.fm | Pandora | LibraryThing | formspring | Blue Moon over Seattle (MCFC)
There's something you can throw in robots.txt to force googlebot to slow down, but I forget the syntax.
That seems like it would be an odd reason. It seems to me that the forums are what make PA great - no matter what you're in to, you'll find a forum you can get in to.
Now that we are on a subdomain, forums.penny-arcade.com, we should be OK, but I'm NOT going to let google get access unless/until we have some sort of caching headers sent with the pages. Otherwise, google has no hints on whether a given page of a given thread has changed or not.
The "right thing" to do, really, is to write out old threads into static-HTML archive files and allow those to be indexed by the big search engines.
But google is cannot let me say, "show me posts made by MKR between July-Aug 2007". google will never be quite as complete of a search as what I can provide here. So there is a search engine I would like to get setup on the server which can interface with the mysql database and can index metadata about all the posts providing practically all of the functionality of the current search page. The catch is, its current version only works well when reading data out of a MySQL database. This search engine is not yet setup on the servers and the timeframe for when it might be setup is both unknown to me and out of my control.
If I export archives to disk but leave all the data in the database, then people using the current search will still have a slowing effect on the system. If I export archives to disk but remove them from the database, then I won't be able to get it into the new search system later. It is for this reason that I've let the problem go as long as it has. But It's been getting pretty bad lately, and I don't think I can wait on the new search system any longer.
So, my interim solution, I think, will be to export archives to disk and then export from the database either into another database, or a series files that can be re-imported into the database at a later time. Then let google and the other search engines in to provide some sort of searching of the archives, but hopefully re-import and re-index the data later so that we can keep full-fidelity search of our content.
I think some several-hundred-thousand PA fans would disagree with you. We do alright for traffic here at the forums, but to say that anyone interested in PA would be interested in what's going on here as well seems empirically false simply based on the fact that PA mainsite unique visitors absolutely dwarfs ours.
I probably should have tossed a qualifier in there saying that's what makes it great to me. Whoops.
But then the riffraff might read our posts!
My sweet, untouched Miranda
And while the seagulls are crying
We fall but our souls are flying
Just sayin
Signing your posts would be an easy fix.
I think it ignores signatures but you could always do it in the body of the message.
How long have you been here? :P
He would be jumped on if he manually signed posts.
My sweet, untouched Miranda
And while the seagulls are crying
We fall but our souls are flying
And I'm going to start signing all my posts from now on.
Meiz - AKA Captain Awesome.
what's up with this i need to know when people talk about me