Request: why do you hate (post) history

[TheFluff]

vbulletin search sucks, news at 11

ANYWAY, I was stalking someone reliving flamewars past narcissistically reading my own post history to remind myself of how awesome I am JUST TRYING TO FIND AN OLD POST WHERE I KNOW THE AUTHOR, OKAY, and it greatly annoys me that if you have made more than 1500 posts over a several year period it's simply not possible to find them all because the useless fucking search form a) only gives you 500 results at a time and b) doesn't let you specify a start date from your search that's further back than a year ago.

Basically, you can find someone's first 500 posts, their most recent 500 posts, and 500 of their posts from a year ago, but everything that's in between that is in posting limbo and might as well not exist at all since you can't find it.

Two possible solutions:
- add more years to the time offset dropdown or alternatively just let me input a date or datetime
- let the search return more results at a time


thank you for your patience in reading this particular hurfing of durf; I don't really expect any fixes but in case someone is bored on a rainy day I'd appreciate this being on the hit list

[Dr. Casey]

I'm welcome to these kinds of changes, but in the meantime do you remember the subforum where the post you're looking for was made? That's another way to narrow things down, at least assuming that a person's posts aren't all clustered together in the same forum.

[relentlessflame]

Well, at the very least, the limit of 500 is configurable, so for now I changed it to 2500. We'll have to monitor server performance to make sure this doesn't cause any issues (and we may have to set it back if it does), but I think it should hopefully be okay.

I do agree that vBulletin search is annoying. I often use Google to find things on this site, but even that may be a bit tricky in this particular case. If you don't remember some unique keyword that was in that post, it's the proverbial needle in the haystack, except you can only get to part of the haystack...

[Kotohono]

This method is more inefficient, but it seems to find any result you would want.

1. Go to advanced search.

2. Search by the username and display results by threads (posted in or made by the user depending what you want).

3. Search for the user within the desired thread, once you see the thread. To find the posts you're seeking.

This generally finds anything since, number of threads almost never passes the search limit threshold.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

Well, at the very least, the limit of 500 is configurable, so for now I changed it to 2500. We'll have to monitor server performance to make sure this doesn't cause any issues (and we may have to set it back if it does), but I think it should hopefully be okay.

As I said the other day, I think you are using SphinxSearch. It's blazingly fast and simply returns a sorted array of matching message IDs. How the posts associated with those IDs are displayed in vBulletin is controlled by the native display code plus whatever modifications GHDpro made to vBulletin.

You'll have to ask him whether he passes the maximum number of matches from the vB admin settings back to Sphinx. From my experience with Sphinx, returning all the matching IDs takes but an instant. (Most of my databases have 30-50K indexed items though, nothing like the 4 million in AS!) I would think you could easily set an upper limit of 10,000 matches in Sphinx and still get back nearly instantaneous results from a dataset of 4 million. It's that fast.

One reason I stress this fact is that GHDpro actually took the effort to substantially upgrade the search service by dumping the native vBulletin engine and replacing it with Sphinx. I saw an immediate and welcome speed increase when he did that, so I started using Sphinx myself. Like others here I have some issues with vB search, but I just wanted to remind everyone that the AS staff really do care about problems like this and have been remarkably responsive for a group of volunteers.

Cheers!

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

Well, at the very least, the limit of 500 is configurable, so for now I changed it to 2500. We'll have to monitor server performance to make sure this doesn't cause any issues (and we may have to set it back if it does), but I think it should hopefully be okay.

Cool, good enough for me, I found the post I was looking for. Thanks!