The search function doesn't work.

Tomi on 20/4/2004 at 00:41

No matter how simple keywords I enter, I always get this:

Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

I think I should be able to find the word "thief" somewhere around the Thief forums, or "George" in the Community Chat. :p I have no idea what could be wrong, is it my computer or this browser (I've started to use Opera only recently) or is the search function simply not working at the moment?

mopgoblin on 20/4/2004 at 02:18

I just tried the searches, and got 535 matches for George in commchat (entire posts, results as threads, any date, sorted by last post date (descending order)). Are you searching within titles only, perhaps?

On the other hand, when searching for thief in Thief Series, I don't get any further than "Your search is in progress and you will be taken to the results in a moment. Thank you for your patience.", even if I only ask it for posts from "yesterday and newer". Not too sure why that is - I'd expect it to be able to optimise a search limited by date rather well, resulting in a very short delay...

Salvage on 20/4/2004 at 03:49

Works in Opera 7.23 for me.

David on 20/4/2004 at 05:26

The search does work, but does (as far as I know) exclude very common words, much like Google does, unlike Google there doesn't appear to be a way to force them.
It also doesn't doa Full Text SQL search, but uses a Search Index which is a massive list of words cross-linked to the threads they appear in.
Unfortunatley this can lead to poor search results but does seem to lower server load quite a bit.
There are several full-text SQL hacks available, I may have a look into those and see if they are acceptable.

Wuggles on 20/4/2004 at 07:17

I've never had a problem with the search, If it lowers server load, I'd keep it as it is (Searching is fine, but the lag TTLG's been having lately is annoying)

Tomi, are you running a firewall like zonealarm or an ad blocker or something like it, proxomitron perhaps? I'm gonna bet that something is filtering out your POST data, and hence the server is getting a search query of nothing. Have you tried using IE? I'm not at all familiar with opera so I don't know if it does any filtering of its own.

David on 20/4/2004 at 07:25

Quote:

Originally posted by Wuggles
(Searching is fine, but the lag TTLG's been having lately is annoying)

Dollars to donuts it is the server itself causing this as we've started getting more popular as the Thief III news pours in and it is only a lowly P3 700 with 512MB RAM so it tends to run maxxed out 24/7 or so I am told. Saam ordered bits for a new server, but the motherboard was DOA. :(

Tomi on 20/4/2004 at 09:21

Interesting - the search function seems to work a little bit better today! I still can't find what I was looking for though, but no worries, I found it 'manually'.

Wuggles - Yes, I'm using ZoneAlarm firewall, I don't think it has never caused any problems, but then again I didn't even think that this could be somehow related to the firewall!

Anyway, TTLG was incredibly slow last night when I tried the search, maybe too many people were trying the same at the same time or something.

Wuggles on 20/4/2004 at 10:18

Quote:

Originally posted by David
P3 700 with 512MB RAM

Please tell me that you've typoed somewhere. Maybe you mean a 3-processor 700MHz with 5GB of ram?

I can't believe TTLG is running off of that! Kudos to you guys making it work as well as it does, I didn't think that was possible!

MsLedd on 20/4/2004 at 21:05

No, he didn't typo. Trust me, it has not been easy keeping the hamsters running this thing and at this point I am literally out of magic (or other) tricks to fortify the hamsters, so the new server will be a VERY welcome thing. :)