In every displayed post in every thread there’s a dropdown menu hanging off the user’s name at the upper left. One of the choices is “Find all posts by <username>”.
When I select that option about 19 times out of 20 I immediately receive an error page: “This forum requires that you wait 120 seconds between searches. Please try again in 119 seconds.” When this message appears it always says 119 seconds and always says that regardless of whether I have searched for anything in any way recently.
This has been true for at least a year and maybe forever. I’m just now motivated to post about it.
After some experimenting today I think the situation might be that the feature will work correctly for non-guest subjects, but always returns the error message for guests. By that I mean that if I, as a logged-in Charter Member (yaay me :)), pull up the “Find all posts by <any non-guest>” it works but trying “Find all posts by <any guest>” will always fail.
OTOH, if I go to the advanced search page and enter the name of any guest into the “find posts by username” box, it works fine.
Looks like a bug to me. But at least I’ve identified a solid repro and a workaround. So this post may be useful to somebody in the future. If only they could search to find it!
The 119 seconds suggests that either you are double-clicking on “Find posts by”, or a single clickon that is interpreted somewhere as a double click. I only get it when I now that I’ve clicked twice.
“Find all posts by” usually works fine for me. Keep in mind that some things that may not seem like “searches” actually do count as searches and start the 120 second delay. Such as clicking on the “New Posts” link at the top of the page.
I had a similar thought to Giles and was quite careful to not double-click and still got the same results.
@Tangent I’m also aware of the implicit searches effect. But the fact the error is always reported as 119 seconds and never any other value implies it’s not some recent implicit search like clicking “New Threads” or “User CP”. One second is an implausibly short time for a page to render and me to read enough to decide to research some poster, then click his/her name, then click “find all posts”.
With more fiddling I’ve learned about another factor. I use a Surface tablet with IE11 and usually use the touchscreen to activate these links rather than the trackpad and mouse buttons.
The problem is more likely to occur when selecting and clicking the link via the touchscreen than when doing it with the trackpad and mouse buttons. Neither method is 100% success or 100% fail though.
My usual use case for “Find all posts by …” is checking on names I don’t recognize to see just how newbie (or how insane) they are. So I suppose another factor could be something related to how the search indexes are developed. Obviously if that’s just doing a [SELECT * FROM Posts WHERE UserID= @UserID] the indexes will necessarily be up to date. But if the implementation depends on the full text searching features, well … the hamsters could be a wee bit behind.
It works fine for me. I just did a search on all posts by LSLGuy and got immediate results. After two minutes I did a search on all posts by Giles and then Tangent. I had no problem. In fact, I’ve never had a problem with searches unless I’ve performed one less than 120 seconds previously.
I’m using an Android phone to post, so I’m using a touch screen. I’ve also used iPhones on this site and have never had an issue.
I’m using Google Chrome and have just repeated the problem that LSLGuy reports. I clicked on his name, then Find All Posts By, and got the error message about waiting 120 seconds. Single clicks throughout.
Edit: and I’ve just tried it on cochrane and it worked fine.
The search function here is admittedly a bit wonky.
What’s weird is that for some people it works pretty much perfectly, but for other people it’s practically unusable. Then for some people it’s hit or miss. And there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it either.
I personally don’t usually have any problems with it.
Unfortunately, if you are one of the people who has problems with it, I don’t have a lot to offer you in terms of a solution. Using an ad blocker and a script blocker sometimes helps, sometimes not. The only other recommendation is to use google. There’s a sticky at the top of ATMB that has detailed instructions for that.
FWIW, the conventional & advanced search page always works fine for me regardless of the parameters. Net of the Board’s general reliability.
The more data points I collect about the “Find all posts by …” issue the more I’m convinced it’s random, perhaps related to server load in that particular half-second or something. The guest/non-guest correlation I reported above is probably a red herring. As is the touchscreen vs mouse click correlation.
An hour ago either search would succeed (after waiting the required 120 seconds between tries).
Just now the dropdown search failed with the 119 second message for guest Whiskey Dickins but succeeded for member JRDelirious. And the search under the Statistics tab succeeded for both.
I waited 5 minutes then tried the same four searches again with the same four results. Three successes and a fail on WD’s dropdown search.
Make of that what you will. My vote now is either random server load or a dirty-data bug that only triggers when I happen to inherit some dirty object from the previous server request on the same thread that’s servicing my request.
