search issue

JasonD

Hi. I'm new here. These forums were mentioned in an XNA developer's video on YouTube, so I thought there was a developer's community here. I see no 'about page', and the main forum names don't really give away what this forum is all about... it looks like game players, not game makers. In any case, instead of asking like a noob I decided to use the search function to sniff out developer talk on the forums, and I get this error:

"This forum requires that you wait 55 seconds between searches. Please try again in 44 seconds."

One search every 60 seconds? So I have to wait a whole minute to search again when the first search fails? Isn't the first thing people are supposed to do on forums is to search for the answer before bugging everyone with a post? :?

Willeth

It's intended behaviour. Searching a forum is the most taxing process a user can do, and with a community this big if there's no limit on it the whole forum grinds to a halt.

The XNA Community Games developer thread is in Games and Technology. If you search for Community Games (in a minute or two ) you should find it fairly easily.

Thanatos

JasonD wrote: »

Hi. I'm new here. These forums were mentioned in an XNA developer's video on YouTube, so I thought there was a developer's community here. I see no 'about page', and the main forum names don't really give away what this forum is all about... it looks like game players, not game makers. In any case, instead of asking like a noob I decided to use the search function to sniff out developer talk on the forums, and I get this error:

"This forum requires that you wait 55 seconds between searches. Please try again in 44 seconds."

One search every 60 seconds? So I have to wait a whole minute to search again when the first search fails? Isn't the first thing people are supposed to do on forums is to search for the answer before bugging everyone with a post? :?

Searching is pretty much the most server-intensive functionality that the servers have. We can either have forums that are up 95% of the time that let you search once a minute, or forums that are up 50% of the time that let you search all you want. We've elected to go with the former.

Willeth

Since I'm being helpful, here's the link to the thread. As an aside, most of us are players rather than developers, but there are a lot of devs in that thread. And of course, the great thing about XNA is that players can become developers without too much standing in their way.

Älphämönkëy

JasonD wrote: »

Hi. I'm new here. These forums were mentioned in an XNA developer's video on YouTube, so I thought there was a developer's community here. I see no 'about page', and the main forum names don't really give away what this forum is all about... it looks like game players, not game makers. In any case, instead of asking like a noob I decided to use the search function to sniff out developer talk on the forums, and I get this error:

"This forum requires that you wait 55 seconds between searches. Please try again in 44 seconds."

One search every 60 seconds? So I have to wait a whole minute to search again when the first search fails? Isn't the first thing people are supposed to do on forums is to search for the answer before bugging everyone with a post? :?

We recently opened up robots.txt to allow searching via your search engine of choice.

bowen

IMO, it does seem an... off behavior that if the search fails, you're still locked out of the search for the full minute. Was that built into vBulletin?

JasonD

Thanks for all of the replies guys. It's rather refreshing to see people take criticism lightly and constructively. It appears the best solution would be to have a visible search box in the upper-right corner that uses Google to do the search. Google's search technology must be better than the forum's, and it won't tax your resources. Personally, I'd prefer a search box that's already visible / present. For one, I've always hated those pop-up ones that require you to click yet again to get the keyboard focus. And two, people will use search more often if it's so easily accessible.

Thanks for the run-down about what Penny Arcade forums are all about. I really didn't know how best to find out. I'll check out that section on XNA. You're right, XNA makes it rather easy for gamers to become developers; it's amazing technology. I'm programming Duality ZF in XNA myself.

Thanks again!

Willeth

bowen wrote: »

IMO, it does seem an... off behavior that if the search fails, you're still locked out of the search for the full minute. Was that built into vBulletin?

Well, it still does the search. It trawls through the database even if it finds nothing.

I do find it weird that if you search for something with fewer than three characters and the search doesn't run at all, that you still have to wait a minute, but I think that's been explained before.

Älphämönkëy

JasonD wrote: »

Thanks for all of the replies guys. It's rather refreshing to see people take criticism lightly and constructively.

JasonD wrote: »

It appears the best solution would be to have a visible search box in the upper-right corner that uses Google to do the search. Google's search technology must be better than the forum's, and it won't tax your resources. Personally, I'd prefer a search box that's already visible / present. For one, I've always hated those pop-up ones that require you to click yet again to get the keyboard focus. And two, people will use search more often if it's so easily accessible.

Agreed, but we need to get the data into a format that Google can parse effectively. The vBulletin sitemap plugin will accomplish that, but it requires us to upgrade our codebase.

The problem with our forums is that we have made a lot of custom modifications to the source code. Unfortunately, vBulletin (PHP applications in general) are rarely written in a modular way that allows for plugins or extensions. Instead we end up making our code changes directly into the source, which inevitably becomes a tangled web of darkness and terror.

Älphämönkëy

Willeth wrote: »

I do find it weird that if you search for something with fewer than three characters and the search doesn't run at all, that you still have to wait a minute, but I think that's been explained before.

I actually think that is a legitimate bug.

Tube

I remember when we switched with a staunch promise that we weren't going to modify the code for that very reason.

That lasted all of three weeks.

Älphämönkëy

I'm just waiting for the Russians to get a bit farther on the pybb.

Things I want:

• Any database besides MySQL
• Integration with Google Custom Search
• a pony

Jasconius

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk

Thanatos

Cardboard Tube wrote: »

I remember when we switched with a staunch promise that we weren't going to modify the code for that very reason.

That lasted all of three weeks.

See, if we'd just adopt SA's disciplinary policies, we wouldn't have to worry about custom jail coding.

EvilBadman

Thanatos wrote: »

Cardboard Tube wrote: »

I remember when we switched with a staunch promise that we weren't going to modify the code for that very reason.

That lasted all of three weeks.

See, if we'd just adopt SA's disciplinary policies, we wouldn't have to worry about custom jail coding.

Ah, but search and probation are additional purchases beyond the forum access.
It is amazing to see someone probated for 100,000 hours, though.

Tube

Thanatos wrote: »

Cardboard Tube wrote: »

I remember when we switched with a staunch promise that we weren't going to modify the code for that very reason.

That lasted all of three weeks.

See, if we'd just adopt SA's disciplinary policies, we wouldn't have to worry about custom jail coding.

Maybe you should go work for SA then.

JustinSane07

My issue with the Search function is when I tried searching for a "Call of Duty" thread the other day in G&T. I was told that searches must be a minimum of 4 words.

Really? 4 words? What the hell?

Grobian

JustinSane07 wrote: »

My issue with the Search function is when I tried searching for a "Call of Duty" thread the other day in G&T. I was told that searches must be a minimum of 4 words.

Really? 4 words? What the hell?

That should read 4 letters. And it is referring to the "of".

/edit: This was discussed several times, I don't know why the message you get is still misleading. Also the current search system doesn't do phrase searches.

bowen

It's time consuming to do a search/replace on a php page (or in the case of strings with more than one word, omit the faulty value).

Or, there are more important things to be developing (new frontpage I guess?).

It's been discussed ad nauseum. Just cry every time you do a search and type something like Call of Duty and get the message and wait a minute and do it again.

JasonD

alphamonkey wrote: »

Agreed, but we need to get the data into a format that Google can parse effectively. The vBulletin sitemap plugin will accomplish that, but it requires us to upgrade our codebase.

How about letting Google merely parse the pages ineffectively? You may laugh, but merely having a form that forwards to this:
Google: site:forums.penny-arcade.com xna
resolves almost all of the problems.

Älphämönkëy

JasonD wrote: »

How about letting Google merely parse the pages ineffectively? You may laugh, but merely having a form that forwards to this:
Google: site:forums.penny-arcade.com xna
resolves almost all of the problems.

It's a good suggestion, but if I am going to go through the time and expense of integrating with Google, I would want the results to be better than what users could get Google searching the forums manually.

I agree something needs to be done, but I'm not sure that forwarding to Google is it.

JasonD

Do you want them to be better because users can manually get the results as-is, so just replicating that isn't good enough? I doubt many are actually typing "site:forums.penny-arcade.com search terms" in Google, since it's not a quick thing. Perhaps Google toolbar users are though, since it has a Site Search button.

Maybe the Google forward is good enough until you have time for a better fix?

Blake T

Maybe a combination?

If you do a search and try again it can come up with "Sorry you can only search once every 55 seconds please wait XX seconds, alternatively use google"

Just_Bri_Thanks

Recommending google after a timer prompt like that just comes off to me somewhat like saying "...because fuck if we can be bothered."

And I don't think the guys here want to have that appearance.

Älphämönkëy

JasonD wrote: »

Maybe the Google forward is good enough until you have time for a better fix?

I agree with you to a point: it is a more usable solution. The problem is that I don't like how Google brands their search. Google's name and ads are prominently displayed on the search pages. At that point it is no longer just an engineering decision, but it is now a business decision.

That said, I can pay both developer time and money to programmatically query Google and display the results using our template system without taxing our servers. To me this is a huge win but I don't have the time to do it right now.

Jasconius

I did something like that in .NET except with GIS. (regexing out their image url's on the server).

It's like 6 hours of work-ish

But I'm guessing that the official Sitesearch has a bunch of business rules that have to be accounted for which slows things up.

Yar

For a while they used to talk about me in the chat thread pretty regularly, and I was never in that thread. So now and then I search for "Yar" as a search term. And then I remember that it is too short of a search string, so I get refused. And it is apparently very taxing on the server to remind me of that, because I am then locked out for 60 seconds. And sometimes the timer resets for an additional 60 for no apparent reason. But I so rarely search for anything that it doesn't really matter.

bowen

Yar wrote: »

For a while they used to talk about me in the chat thread pretty regularly, and I was never in that thread. So now and then I search for "Yar" as a search term. And then I remember that it is too short of a search string, so I get refused. And it is apparently very taxing on the server to remind me of that, because I am then locked out for 60 seconds. And sometimes the timer resets for an additional 60 for no apparent reason. But I so rarely search for anything that it doesn't really matter.

It is very taxing on the database server to do a logic check before anything is actually submitted or searched. I imagine it's just a bug in the vBulletin code. I'd hope anyways.

Henroid

Ego searches are the best use of the search function.

Ringo

Not since The Beatles: Rock Band was announced!