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?
Posts
The XNA Community Games developer thread is in Games and Technology. If you search for Community Games (in a minute or two
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
We recently opened up robots.txt to allow searching via your search engine of choice.
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!
Duality ZF -- new 2D Xbox 360 shmup featuring Dual Play:
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.
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
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.
That lasted all of three weeks.
Things I want:
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.
Maybe you should go work for SA then.
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.
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.
Google: site:forums.penny-arcade.com xna
resolves almost all of the problems.
Duality ZF -- new 2D Xbox 360 shmup featuring Dual Play:
I agree something needs to be done, but I'm not sure that forwarding to Google is it.
Maybe the Google forward is good enough until you have time for a better fix?
Duality ZF -- new 2D Xbox 360 shmup featuring Dual Play:
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"
Satans..... hints.....
And I don't think the guys here want to have that appearance.
We are the monsters under our beds.
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.
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.
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.
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