The Old Forums

Xenthos

There is a lot of information on the old forums.  My understanding is that they were kept around so that we could still get access to it.

However, right now when I try to do a search on it I get: The Apache Solr search engine is not available. Please contact your site administrator.
Further, even if it was available, it no longer has all the search options it used to, which will make finding anything useful on it much, much harder than it used to be.

Finally, doing a Google search with the parameter site:oldforums.lusternia.com yields nothing.

Please help us folk who like to trawl data and history out a bit here!

Shedrin

Search "site:www.lusternia.com/node" on google.

Xenthos

Thanks, that did indeed find what I was looking for.

Xenthos

Still would be nice if the search feature worked, though.  Having to go out and do a node search via Google is a little convoluted.

Though I guess it does mean that there won't be as much competition for going back for historical events and the like.  *cough*

Tully

Now you might see the downside to putting all subjects in Tweets.  I'll bet it will be easier to find things from 2006-2009 than 2009-2012, before the "Twitter Revolution" messed with people's heads and changed the way we communicate.

Can't always depend on a search engine working.

Then again, who knows how long things like forums and stuff will last.  

(The downside of Facebook is the ability to search a wall or "go back".  :-/)

Xenthos

Tully said:

Now you might see the downside to putting all subjects in Tweets.  I'll bet it will be easier to find things from 2006-2009 than 2009-2012, before the "Twitter Revolution" messed with people's heads and changed the way we communicate.

Can't always depend on a search engine working.

Then again, who knows how long things like forums and stuff will last.  

(The downside of Facebook is the ability to search a wall or "go back".  :-/)

Uh, not really.

Searches are based on post content, not thread names.  Hits are returned as posts, not threads, and it takes you right to that page.

This is true of any good search engine no matter what.

PS: Facebook's search is awful, yes.  It doesn't change the fact that a good search engine will do just fine whether all posts are in the same thread or separate threads, though!

Xenthos

Another addition: The search engine on these forums is also abysmal.  There are apparently some plugins for vanilla forums that can get much better capability in there, but alas, it's not in existence here.

If you want to discuss the downsides of the "social revolution," I would focus there more than anywhere else; there's a lot more emphasis these days on transitory events.  Post it and then forget about it.  Things like snapchat are pretty good examples of this.

That's the thing that bothers me, I like my history to not be fleeting but where I can find it and reminisce / remember the good old days.

Tully

Actually, if you've studied SEO, thread names may be better (at least for google)--that would have happened if the conversion actually put the thread name in the URL like it does in these forums--right now, since the conversion was likely done quickly, everything's got a node id instead of an optimized slug, which doesn't help in that case.  There was probably too much content to deal with any other way.

I doubt we'll get a dedicated search engine just for the old forums, it's probably not high on the list of web site priorities, depending on how its setup in Drupal is handled and how much resources it takes up.  And it will never be the same as the old forum search in any event.

My point is that if people had obeyed the natural taxonomy creating new subjects gives to any discussion forum, you might have had an easier time.  While a search engine can help, you should never depend on that solely to do all the work for you.  

(Regarding this stuff in general--setting up the dedicated ones is a real bitch--I'm pushing in my day job to use Google Search because our search engine is really creaky.  But we're dealing with several hundred thousand pages of content.)

Xenthos

Thread names very rarely have the words of things that I am looking for in them.  I actually don't think I have ever done a search for a thread name.  I always remember snippets of the conversation in the middle of a post and that snippet is what I go searching for.  There's far more information and stuff going on in the threads than the thread name itself implies.

And I wouldn't have had an easier time at all.  My problem was that no results were displayed at all.  Thread titles didn't make a difference.  I put "bob" in as a search term and it returned 0 hits. :P

Once I did the node search I did find it in a few minutes.  The issue was more that the output result is a bit funky (I had to go and tell it not to omit results, too).

Tully

...ignore...