Technical Problem cannot search for 1p-lsd

TheLoveBandit

TheLoveBandit

Indefinite break from BL - contact other admin
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Feb 22, 2000
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This came in via admin email, I'll put it here in case anyone has a good solution to offer, and to leave the answer out in public for future reference:

I keep getting a note saying 1p is too common.

I've tried
1p-lsd
1p lsd
"1p-lsd"
"1p lsd"

how do I search for 1p-lsd to help exclude the zillions of hits that include lsd?
thanks
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Any number will appear as too common, in this case he can search by 1plsd the separator triggers the issue. I've saw that in several cases the bug was reproduced with numbers, words with 3 letters, numbers combined with 1 or 2 letters, the bug repro rate is 100%.
 
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Is the search form able to take regular expressions? If the form is looking for a longer entry, maybe one could look for [0-9]p\-lsd, and there may be no 0p-lsd or 5p-lsd or whatever but the search term will be long enough to not cause the error?
 
I seriously doubt the search form can take regular expressions. Honestly it seems like forum search functionality across various forum software platforms leaves something to be desired. I've been trying to figure out the XF search functionality for use with the trip reports tagging system.
 
Oddly enough if you revert to google and use " Bluelight: "1P-LSD" " it will list lots of links, so that's been my workaround.

I know that you guys are searching for a way to use the internal search engine, but this works for the moment. Better than nothing I suppose.
 
This is a limitation of MySQL. It splits the term at the dash ("-") causing the split terms (1p) to be too short. IIRC it drops everything after the dash so none of that will be included. This has been an on-going issue going back about two decades.

Xorkoth said:
Honestly it seems like forum search functionality across various forum software platforms leaves something to be desired.
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It has been an on-going issue for as long as forums have been around. Searching is the most intensive part of the software and the trade off for the speed are things like this happening. I don't really have a good fix for this because it's a limitation of the database. The tagging system would probably solve the issue assuming all the threads were tagged well. There used to be modifications to vBulletin that would send the search query to google and send back the data to the server which could be included in the forum itself so the user never had to go off site. I don't know if such a modifications exists for xenforo.

Xenforo also sells an enhanced search plug-in: https://xenforo.com/xf1-docs/manual/enhanced-search/

If you send in a support ticket they will respond with an answer that'll let you guys know if it'll fix the issue for you. I'm not experienced enough with this particular add-on to know if it solves this problem. I do know it solves many other issues related to the speed of the default search engine included with the forum software.
 
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TheLoveBandit said:
Do they work with google?
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I can make it work with Google, the problem is that it takes you outside of Bluelight, but maybe that doesn't really matter so much. Also it's supposed to be able to sort by number of replies and other aspects that I don't think Google can do.
 
Just so everyone knows I wasn't suggesting it as a permanant solution, but as a workaround until you've sorted it out.
 
Well, given some of the feedback that the XF search engine is less than desired, we are exploring some options and this feedback of alternate solutions can help guide our efforts to improve.
 
TheLoveBandit said:
Well, given some of the feedback that the XF search engine is less than desired, we are exploring some options and this feedback of alternate solutions can help guide our efforts to improve.
Click to expand...

The same issues existed in vBulletin I just think there weren't a lot of people searching for RCs with dashes in them back then. Did you send in a support ticket to xF? They're pretty good about pointing their customers in the right direction. The reason this works with google is due to the fact that their indexing is far more advanced than what comes with forum software. They don't share their software so no one is able to copy their methods. However, it is possible to run your own proxy for google with searx: https://searx.me/about

Just be aware that google only allows so many requests from external servers a day so if you convert over to it all together they'll probably throttle you pretty quickly and refuse to return results.
 
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