Problem with "Search" function? - Progressive Rock Music Forum

Author

Message

Topic Search

Topic Options

The.Crimson.King View Drop Down

Forum Senior Member

Joined: March 29 2013
Location: WA
Status: Offline
Points: 4596

Topic: Problem with "Search" function?
Posted: July 25 2013 at 16:09

I'm having a hard time getting the search function to return results I know are there.

For example, there's a thread in the "Prog Music Lounge" called "When were you infected by Prog?" and I wanted to see if I'd already posted to it. My 1st attempt was to enter "When were you infected by Prog?" into the keyword, match phrase, then selected "Prog Music Lounge" as the search forum and entered "The.Crimson.King" checking member name exact match. The search brought no results. I tried all kinds of variations ("infected" = keyword, match any words, "The.Crimson.King" member name exact match) but never a single result was returned. Finally I went to the topic and scrolled through the pages and found that I had posted to it on page 20 about 4 months ago.

Can anyone tell me what I was doing wrong in the search function?

Thanks!

Mutiny in Jonestown : Progressive Rock Since 1987

rushfan4

Special Collaborator

Honorary Collaborator

Joined: May 22 2007
Location: Michigan, U.S.
Status: Offline
Points: 66271

Posted: July 25 2013 at 16:22

Not sure. It didn't work for me either. Once it didn't work in the general search. I searched for the thread and then tried doing a topic search within the thread for your user name. This brought up the result of somebody else quoting a post that you made, but it didn't bring up your actual post. I have no idea why this would be.

The.Crimson.King View Drop Down

Forum Senior Member

Joined: March 29 2013
Location: WA
Status: Offline
Points: 4596

Posted: July 25 2013 at 17:15

Ya, it doesn't make any sense to me either. I've tried all kinds of approaches from very specific (searching the specific forum using the complete exact thread name and my exact user name) to general (just 1 word of the thread title in any forum for any user with Crimson in their user name) and I still come up empty.

Another related odd example is if I search the Prog Music Lounge forum for any topic subject containing the word "infected" in the past year I get 0 results. If I do the same for topic "message body" I only get 10 posts where the thread has clearly had 5 pages worth of posts in the past year. Confused

Mutiny in Jonestown : Progressive Rock Since 1987

Dean

Special Collaborator

Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout

Joined: May 13 2007
Location: Europe
Status: Offline
Points: 37575

Posted: July 25 2013 at 17:51

Okay.

First off, the search is a pile of poo, no seriously, it's dreadful, truely awful, but it is usable if you know the tricks.

Here is your search:

As you have discovered puting your name in field "A" does not do quite what you'd expect, and similarily, putting something in field "B" doesn't do quite what you think it does and by magical coincidence putting something in box "C" also manages to do quite the opposite of what you'd expect it to do.

So, what do these fields do?

Field "A" finds the threads you have either created (see note 3) or you have posted in - it does not find the specific posts you have made.
Field "B" finds the threads created after the specified date, so if the drop-down is set to the default 6 Months it will not find threads that were created 7 months ago or 4 years ago even if the last post in that thread was made mere minutes ago. If in doubt set this to "Any Date"
Field "C" is a weird one.and it is related to Field "A":
- When you put a user name in field "A" and field "C" is set to "Posts" the search only returns the posts made by that user in threads he has created.
- When you put a user name in field "A" and field "C" is set to "Topics" the search returns the threads that contain posts made by the user (but not the posts themselves)

So the reason why your search did not find anything is two fold:

The "When were you infected by Prog?" Thread was created on 14 April 2010 - so the default Six Month search in field "B" would have failed.
The "When were you infected by Prog?" Thread was created by "progpositivity" so with the field "C" is set to "Topics" and your name in field "A" the search would have failed.

So, to make it work you need to set the date in field "B" to "Any Date" and the drop-dpwn in field "C" to "Posts"

... the problem there of course is it only displays the thread and not the specific posts you have made. All it tells you is that you have made a post somewhere in the 444 posts made in that thread (not a lot of use since you already knew that).

________________________________________________________________________________________

However

________________________________________________________________________________________

There is another forum search you can use to find specific posts you have made in any given thread. This is located in the header-bar at the top of the first post on each page and is called "Topic Search". With this tool you can search an entire thread for a word or phrase OR if you click the Advanced Search option it will allow you to search for every post made by a specific User.

Woopie!

________________________________________________________________________________________

However

________________________________________________________________________________________

There is another way, and that is to use Google to search the entire forum, to do this put "site:www.progarchives.com/forum" into google's search field with the phrase you are searching for, you can also put the user name in the search field too. To make life easier, the main PA pages (ie not the forum) have a google search built-in that saves having to type "site:www.progarchives.com/forum".

Hope that helps.

Edited by Dean - July 25 2013 at 17:54

What?

The.Crimson.King View Drop Down

Forum Senior Member

Joined: March 29 2013
Location: WA
Status: Offline
Points: 4596

Posted: July 25 2013 at 18:16