03: How to Search These Forums (*NEW* 12/26/2020)

mclemore

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Searching our message forums:

Searching is different now (than on our previous forum system):


Searching has been complicated to work through on our new system. It simply works differently than it did under vBulletin. While both good and bad, it can be frustrating. I'm creating this FAQ to help you find the content you are looking for as much as possible, with a limited level of frustration.

Searching through just forums instead of all items (forums, conversations, media items, etc.)

By default, clicking on the Search box bring up a search form that searches multiple parts of the forum system. To search on just the forums, one would have to click on 'Search', then 'Advanced Search', and then 'Search Threads'. There is an easier way.

Most often while on the forums the first tab is highlighted: 'Forums'. Right underneath this is a sub-menu bar and on it is a 'Search Forums' button. This single click takes you to the same search form that the three clicks above takes you to.

Advanced Searching:

You can tune search results by including or excluding words with the following operators. Note that the ~N operators, are not necessarily easy to use.
  • + signifies AND operation
  • | signifies OR operation
  • - negates a single token
  • " wraps a number of tokens to signify a phrase for searching
  • * at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
In theory, the following should work too, but we haven't been able to get them to work right yet:
  • ( and ) signify precedence
  • ~N after a word signifies edit distance (fuzziness)
  • ~N after a phrase signifies slop amount
To use one of these characters literally, escape it with a preceding backslash (\).

Searching for threads instead of by posts

Our current Xenforo system (which was designed by the team that designed our old vBulletin system) doesn't gjve as much weight to threads as the old system did… it thinks in posts. As such, there isn't currently a way to search for threads created by a specific user system wide. Also, when ordering search results by date, it will sort only by the dates of matching posts. There is no way to sort by the last activity there was in the thread the post was made in.

Now that said, some of the functionality that is missing from the search feature can be found while browsing individual sections. In you go to a specific section, say 'General Arcade and Videogame Discussions, you will see a list of threads. At the top of the list, on the right, is a 'Filters' drop down. From there you can sort by the creation date of a thread, or by the date of the last post in it. And you can limit to threads created by a specific user.

Word Stemming

On 12/26/2020, we stopped the system from word stemming on searchers. Intended to be helpful, many users didn't find it so. A search for 'shipping' for example would also find posts that included 'shipped'. And a search for 'Sente' would find 'sent' results. So now the system will try and assume less for you.

Search Results Sort Order

Additionally, by default, the sorts search results by 'relevance'. Soon after launch we added the ability to sort by date instead. We've changed the default sort order back and forth between date and relevance. Currently it defaults to sorting by relevance, which hopefully is working a little better with word stemming turned off.

Minimum Search Term Length

Currently the search services ignore any term less than 4 characters. In the future we will likely change it to allow 3 letter words also.

Alternate Searching: Google

An other alternative is to do a site search in google, for example:

site:forums.arcade-museum.com intitle:galaga

site:forums.arcade-museum.com allintitle:bally sente
 
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