[ ] Forum Search

I’ve been knocked out for the last few weeks as I seem to blow out my back with more and more regularity these days. While laid out, I did put together a forum search mechanism. A few things to note:

This is not as sophisticated as the standard search. That is using a 3rd party application to handle all the edge cases, diacritical characters, mispellings etc. I spend a week trying to force the forums into that app only to find that it quickly ran me into storage use charges (forum posts are long) that became unreasonable expensive very quickly.

Instead this is a simple string search that tries and finds the search query inside of posts. Also it is case sensitive (as the entire database is) so a search on 'Evidence' is different from 'evidence'. At this time, I can’t make it any more advanced than that. I’m looking into a different search service that can handle both the standard search as well as forum search but that takes even more time to research and implement.

For now hopefully you guys will find this basic search useful.


Kevin

Thanks for this, seems to work just fine! One small suggestion... When the results are returned, it would be more helpful for the top of the page to give the total number of forum posts with the search string, rather than the number of posts on a single results page (which only goes up to 30).

You got it!


Kevin

Fabulous. Doing some searches, I came across this thread from *18 years ago* where we're talking about problems with some features on the old site (including forum search!) relating to the newly released Firefox 1.5. I'm now using Firefox... 120.0.

[bandtoband.com] https://bandtoband.com/forums/complete-shambles/sidebar-broken-in-firefox-15-109...

I get a 500 server error when searching for Joan Jett

Also, to help with the case sensitivity somewhat, is it possible to make every forum search do 2-3 searches and then combine the results? I'm thinking something like the following:

a.) The search exactly as entered, eg.: and the Wailers
b.) A search with the 1st letter of every word capitalised, eg.: And The Wailers
c.) A search in lowercase, eg.: and the wailers

In this example, a.) returns 5 Wiki World results, b.) returns 7 results from various sections, and c.) returns a result from a different Wiki World thread, so they could combine to give 13 results. Any duplicate post IDs could also be eliminated.

In most cases the search we enter will already be lowercase so c.) can be skipped. Or if the search we enter is a name with every word capitalised then b.) can be skipped.

Forum search isn't working for me at all on mobile - could it be the same issue as with the other search?

I've fixed the Joan Jett error. The search was matching against deleted posts from way, way back that weren't expunged from the database (old forum software) and were failing upon initialization. I've stopped the search from matching against those.

I'll try and tackle the other listed issues next.


Kevin

Forum searches are working for me on mobile (now) although the formatting is trash as long links are wrecking the width. Can someone confirm that mobile is working for them as well?

Good point on case sensitive searches. It shouldn't be a huge lift to do multiple ones on different capitalization schemes as forum searches are local, as opposed to the 3rd party service, and not frequent so it won't risk taking the server down. I'll try to get some of those inplace.


Kevin

It works, although it’s still case sensitive. For example, “Mark lanegan” has no results, you have to type “Mark Lanegan”.

I'm still getting nothing on Chrome on mobile.

I've merged multiple capitalization options as suggested by bloopy above such that searches are not necessarily case insentive any more.

"Alice Cooper" will now match on:

Alice Cooper
Alice cooper
alice Cooper
alice cooper

That should hopefully improve the quality of the search results.

Furthermore, I've also truncated long URL's at appear on small screens and wreck the layout. They'll still display as normal on large monitors but on Album Notes, Forum Posts, and (slightly differently formatted) in Forum search results.

Now I have to figure out the issue with mobile forum search not working at all...


Kevin

Results look great now, capitalisation-wise.

Seems it doesn't do anything for me on Chrome mobile either.

I just pulled up Chrome on my iPhone and was able to do forum searches just fine? What kind of phone are you guys using? I'm guessing it might have something to do with submitting the form and I could use a submit button on mobile devices just to be sure it works.


Kevin

Android here. Mine's a Sharp so I don't currently have a 2nd built-in browser like some brands do.

I do have developer tools/debugging enabled, so in theory I could plug my phone into my laptop at some point and see if I can see any errors in the Chrome developer console. I'm surprised it's so much more difficult to access that than on desktop.

Android too. I'm on an old Huawei.

I've added a submit button for small screens for forum searches, and a submit button for all size screens on the search page (used on mobile):

[bandtoband.com] https://bandtoband.com/search

Let me know if this solves your issues.


Kevin