I wake up this morning and hit the “New Posts” button. The search results go to 5 pages, 109 threads with new activity. Start opening interesting threads from page 1.
Finish my coffee, close up the laptop and head off to work. During midmorning lull finish page 1 and continue on to page 2, opening threads that look interesting on that page.
Click the page 3 button … “Sorry, no matches. Please try some different terms.”
Hey, this searchid is new as of this morning! :mad:
A “new posts” searchid used to be good for several days. I could drag-and-drop the url to the desktop and double-click it and continue where I left off. Good thing, too, since if I actually go someone on the weekend and don’t browse the Dope, search results on Monday can be 796 newly active threads to consider opening.
Having searchids expire in a matter of hours really sucks!
Just wanted to add that I browse the boards the same way AHunter3 does, and I had the same problem this morning. About two hours after doing my New Posts search, my search expired.
This feature seemed to be working just fine yesterday after board maintenance, and neither my browser or user settings changed overnight.
I assume this is an issue with session timeouts and the upgrade to the newest version of vBulletin. Sessions will timeout on the SDMB after 15 minutes. I’m not aware of this parameter being changed in the upgrade but anything is possible. vBulletin Version 3.0.7 might also handle sessions differently than vBulletin Version 3.0.0 Release Candidate 4. As noted things are now different.
Checking the vBulletin forums there are a number of complaints about New Posts searches timing out. Here’s a typical thread that received a comment from the developers in the last two weeks.
They say changing session timeouts is under consideration for a future version. In the interim there are recommendations to use a feature of the search engine that will return all posts in the last X number of days.
Obviously these are going to return a lot of posts due to the heavy traffic of the SDMB. When I just ran the last day search it returned over 17 pages of posts…
It may be related to session timeouts now but it wasn’t related to session timeouts before unless sessions didn’t time out for several days.
Chronos, on the other current thread re: this problem, wrote:
e
I shut down and relocate to other locations, reboot, and reopen things. I used to be able to save the “New Posts” URLs by dragging them to the desktop. Now to accomplish the same thing I need to open each page, as Chronos suggests, then actually save each page (not its URL, which will expire) to hard drive.
The workarounds suggested amount to “Then don’t use the New Posts feature, use some other feature.” Well, if you can’t fix it, I’ll probably have to, but I like using New Posts, and it used to work, and what it does now doesn’t really constitute “working”, although I suppose it might on a board with far less traffic.
You could use the suggestion from Chronos combined with putting your laptop into hibernation mode so that the pages will still be there after relocating.
Can’t do that with current laptop. The 60 gig Hitachi doesn’t play nicely with the vintage-'98 sensor magnet that controls sleep mode and/or the unsupported MacOS 10.3.8 that isn’t supposed to run on WallStreets. If it put it to sleep, it’s euthanasia, not hibernation: it ain’t waking back up again minus a hard reboot.
I just finished browsing the 10 pages of saved New Posts results from this morning, using the method I described. It isn’t as horrid as it sounds. I am making a QuicKeys macro to facilitate the opening of pages. The cool thing is that I can save search results and open them months later this way if I want, they’ll never expire
So again vBulletin makes with the “fix two things, break something new” theme for upgrades. (sigh).
Oh, and another thing. This morning, when you hit the New Posts link, there are less than ten threads showing, and didn’t include the thread I posted to this morning. I’ve found this to be a problem in the past; way fewer threads show up than obviously have been posted to in the time (24 hours?) period of the search.
Also, there’s no way to simply pull up all threads posted to in a particular time period; there has to be either a keyword or user name…two thumbs way down!
For some reason, this thread title does not appear on my ATMB main page list of threads, it only appears on my user control panel as the most recently posted thread in this forum.
My habit nowadays is, after clicking New Posts, to open a new tab for each SDMB page until I have all the threads with new activity listed on one tab or another.
Then, if I have to shut down and go elsewhere, I save the tabs I haven’t gotten to as .html documents, which lets me go back to them later.
Agreed. It would be way cool if we could do a search for all posts between April 1 and October 31, 2003, in GQ, GD, and Pit, without having to specify a poster or a find-string. There are so many times when I can recall the gist of a post I want to reread but the words I can recall are too short or too common to search on…but I have a good idea of when it was made.
Having to make more clumsy searches due to more clumsy tools means more wear and tear on the hamsters.
If you just want to look for all threads in a particular date range, why would you use the search engine? Just set the forum page to show all threads, and then go to page 50 or 67 or 493 or whatever page you need. This is both quicker for you and easier on the hampsters, and the URL will remain valid until new threads push it to a new page (at which point you just hit “next page”).
