Complaints/requests about the forum software

I really don't like the current version of the forum software. I know this isn't going to happen but I wish ETC would go back to using standard forum software like they did at the beginning. I can never remember how to do things like find all posts by a user because everything is hidden behind icons instead of having clickable text links.

There are too many annoying popups.  Edit, they fixed this, thanks

 

And there needs to be an advanced search. Check out this one for an example: http://iatse728.secure-mall.com/cgi-bin/phpbb/search.php?sid=7492cc843d83c7a0c76be30ded4e43d9

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  • "Advanced search" should have the ability to search topic titles or post text. There should be an option to show results as topics, so you don't get inundated with replies to the same post in the search results.
    Search strings in quotes should return an exact match only.
    Have an option to filter searches by user name.
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  • Hi ,

    Thank you for the feedback. Here are some replies to your concerns:

    John728 said:
    "Advanced search" should have the ability to search topic titles or post text. There should be an option to show results as topics, so you don't get inundated with replies to the same post in the search results.

    Search, in general, searches post text and thread titles with greater relevance weight given generally to thread titles. Depending on the query, you may see that a particular thread has multiple posts that contain the search term(s). Sorting by post is a good idea and I've added it to the list.

    John728 said:
    Search strings in quotes should return an exact match only.

    They do if you use "double quotes" (note the " character is different from the ' character). Is there a search term that isn't returning exact matches?

    John728 said:
    Have an option to filter searches by user name.

    There are several filters available in advanced search. The "By anyone" is the filter that allows you to filter results by user.

    Here is a screen shot of the full filter list:

  • "They do if you use "double quotes" (note the " character is different from the ' character). Is there a search term that isn't returning exact matches?"

    It never works. I just copied and pasted "character is different from" from your above post into the search bar, put double quotes around it, and got "We couldn’t find anything that matches your search. "
  • Be careful of leading spaces in your copy/paste. I repeated your search terms and it returned my post and your reply to it.

    I think that you might be running into an indexing timing issue. There is some time between when a post is posted and the search index service fully indexes it.

    I'll have a look at seeing if that timing can be shortened to avoid confusion in the future.