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  • Trip Reports Moderator: Cheshire_Kat

⫸STICKY⫷ ** Beta version of a new TR database searching system is live! **

Xorkoth

Xorkoth

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Feb 8, 2006
Messages
65,033
Hey trip report readers! The mods and I have been hard at work (since 2006 8() implementing a tagging system that is used to return custom search results of trip reports, Erowid style. There are various areas you can search for. For example, with this system you could search for, say, all reports of LSD in combination with a phenethylamine, by experienced users, where there was significant bodyload reported. Our hope is that this tagging/searching system will make us a highly usable trip reports database as useful and well-regarded as Erowid, with the additional benefits that (a) you can reply to reports and talk with the authors, and (b) you can post a report and have it published instantly, rather than having to wait sometimes 10 years or more to get it published on Erowid.

Currently we are in the process of back-tagging every single report ever submitted since 2001, manually, one at a time. I've gotten all of 2009 done, and most of 2018, and a lot of 2017. So there is a long way to go but a lot of reports are tagged now and more will be every day. :)

Eventually we will make the header of the TR forum into a search engine like this, but for now, you can try out the search engine at this link:

https://trs.tru.io

UPDATE: Thanks to thujone for the new search engine beta, which works with the new forum software. Right now it is just a field where you can enter search terms and does not use the tagging system, but we plan to update it to be more like the beta search engine I created for the old forum software, with drop-downs and the ability to utilize tags.

Here are some notes for how to use it:

Searches are combined by default and terms are wild, so if you search "cannabis mdma first time" it will return results all links with that in the title. There's an "or" modifier that's useful for catching all related terms, like "mushroom or psilocybin" will catch results that either term alone will miss... and there's a precision search modifier to eliminate false positives, which can be enabled by appending ! to a search term. For example, "pot" matches terms like "potency" and "spot" but "pot!" will match pot specifically. Two-letter searches generally are too short to recognize but there's an exception for alphanumeric combos so "2c" will match all 2c-x.




KEPT FOR POSTERITY:

Below is the old vBulletin search engine I created, which no longer works.

Trip Report Search Engine Beta

Try it out and let us know what you think! And if there is anything that does not seem to be working, let me know. If you execute a search and any results come back that are not part of Trip Reports or one of its sub-forums, please let me know as well. I get other results sometimes but it might be because I'm a senior mod.
 
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I hope some people want to test this out! I'm trying to get all the bugs out so it can be put on top of the forum proper.
 
It would be great to have an alternative to Erowid. They've been put in an untenable position, where if they publish on novel psychoactive substances, they can drive use and bans. Failing to publish, though, means that users can't make informed decisions.
 
I'm sure there was discussion about this, but it's there a reason why NBOx are in a separate category than psychedelic PEAs?
 
I can't imagine how big a job it would be to assign tags to every report! I checked to ewe if it was working, and the first search I performed (vaporized or inhaled) for EPT failed to find Kaleida's report.
http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads...ght=substancecode_ept&p=14200485#post14200485

I went back and noticed that there was a second field that I had not seen before (smoked). This brought up her report, so that's good.

I then selected smoked and vaporized in the search field, and that brought up no reports. I think the script should be written to search for x-roa OR y-roa, where right now it seems to search for x-roa AND y-roa.

The difference is subtle enough that it might be valuable to group the vaporized and smoked together for clarity. Inhaled (nitrous, etc.) further muddles things
 
Searching by author and experience type (ie Kaleida AND positive) brings up only a blank screen, not a "no reports found" screen.

I could troubleshoot faster, but the DDOS protection limiting me to one search every 15 seconds slows things down a lot.
 
Nice feedback, thanks. :) I won't get to this stuff right away but I'll use this thread as my checklist. Yeah I have to look into whether ORs are allowed and how they would play in terms of order of operations with the ANDs. By the way, "inhaled" is supposed to be a catch-all for vaporization/smoking. But, it also refers to straight inhalation like with nitrous/inhalants. So I need to think of some way to differentiate.

Yeah tagging everything is a huge undertaking. I have some help, wouldn't turn down more! I tag about 100 reports a day. I've finished 2018, most of 2017 and all of 2009. Got the whole rest to go. Some random ones throughout are already tagged too. This project has been in the works since 2006 but this is the first time I've really pushed to fully realize it.
 
Yeah, tagging sounds like a massive undertaking. I know I'm not even remotely meticulous enough for that. :-\

I'll spend some time trying to figure out how to categorize ROAs. Taxonomies are hard in general, practically impossible with drugs. For instance, are DOx phenethylamines, when they are by definition amphetamines? What to do with psychedelic empathogens?

I did notice that I couldn't find TMA-x reports anywhere. This report doesn't seem to come up at all. http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/168330-TMA-2-First-Time-36mg-On-a-psychedelic-amphetamine
 
Yeah that report hasn't been tagged yet. They'll only come up if they've been tagged. Apparently none have been yet. We'll get there!

Yeah I decided to consider DOXs phenethylamines because when people search for "amphetamines" I think they are expecting the stimulant-style amphetamines, not the psychedelic ones. It's a bit ambiguous.

EDIT: I went ahead and tagged that one, and added TMA-2 and TMA-6 to the drop-downs. Also I realized I am in fact assigning "amphetamines" to the DOXs and other psychedelic amphetamines.
 
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I haven't been around for a hot minute, so I missed when this originally started happening, but this is excellent. Thanks so much for your hard work!

If bikeshedding is welcome, I'd like to be able to search by more granular subcategories - e.g. selecting psychedelic phenethylamines and choosing to search for specifically reports on 2Cs, or 3,4,5-subs, or DOxs, or being able to search specifically for RC or pharmaceutical benzodiazepines.

But I really can't complain, because this is phenomenal stuff. :)
 
It may be possible to add tags for more granular categories by querying the database and adding tags (for example, add a 2C-X tag if it finds 2C-B, 2C-C, 2C-D, etc etc etc). or maybe even just have an option that would create a search string of "if 2C-B OR 2C-C OR 2C-D etc etc etc". If I could start over I would have added a few more tags, maybe even an extra category, maybe a ranking system too, but it's immensely time-consuming to back-tag reports, we still have most of all of the reports ever submitted untagged.

Also, we are working on migrating to Xenforo, a modern forum software which will improve many aspects of Bluelight (including hopefully getting us back to the front page of google results), and will also fix the search system. Something someone did to our vB code at some point broke some aspects of searching through creating search URLs, so some features right now in this system are not working as they should. When we upgrade that should be fixed.
 
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Shadowmeister said:
it's immensely time-consuming to back-tag reports, we still have most of all of the reports ever submitted untagged.
Click to expand...

Need any help with that?

Also I was definitely imagining something that just creates a quick-and-dirty search string like "if 2C-B OR 2C-C OR 2C-D etc etc etc" as you mentioned. Then again, looking at the JS code, it doesn't seem that hard to write my own front-end that does that, or even one that implements separate categories. So I might just go that route if I decide I care enough.
 
Yeah it's nothing too complex in terms of the code. My goal is to make the search engine as powerful as possible. I'll have to change how the search query strings are written when we roll out our forum software upgrade to Xenforo (as their search system has a different syntax). I don't think it's useless or trivial (I had to look that up so thanks for the link ;)) to discuss any sort of improvements... indeed, being able to search for sub-categories like 2X-C or DOX is certainly a very useful and welcome feature.

As far as help... yes I would like help. I'll PM you.
 
I'm looking forward to seeing how this will play with the new site architecture
 
Me too! I need to start looking into this. The syntax will be different but our old vB implementation was customized and it had broken some of the search functionality. I'm hoping our out-of-the-box XenForo search abilities will take this to the next level. Thanks for the reminder. :)
 
Just a note: this search engine will not be operational in the new site architecture until I have some time to figure some things out. But it will soon.
 
UPDATE: Our dear ex-staff and longtime member thujone has created a new search engine that will allow us to search much more effectively for trip reports than we were once able to. it does not make use of the tags (yet), but he is working on improving it to be more like the old Beta search engine I created, which does not work with Xenforo. In the meantime, here it is, and I also edited the first post:

https://trs.spr.io

Here are some instructions (it will be updated with dropdowns and the ability to narrow your search to various categories in the future):

Searches are combined by default and terms are wild, so if you search "cannabis mdma first time" it will return results all links with that in the title. There's an "or" modifier that's useful for catching all related terms, like "mushroom or psilocybin" will catch results that either term alone will miss... and there's a precision search modifier to eliminate false positives, which can be enabled by appending ! to a search term. For example, "pot" matches terms like "potency" and "spot" but "pot!" will match pot specifically. Two-letter searches generally are too short to recognize but there's an exception for alphanumeric combos so "2c" will match all 2c-x.
 
thanks Xork :)

it's still in a primitive state but will progress, feedback is welcome
 
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