Do you not understand that sometimes, you need to do more than one search to find what you’re looking for? Or that you did a search for thread titles (the default) and meant to do one for posts only? The 120 second wait then becomes a pain in the ass. It’s not too much to ask that a member-only paid-for search function be available more often than once every two minutes. Other boards manage to do it. Blaming it on An Arky “searching too much” is ridiculous.
Cry me a river.
I want a jet pack with a pony in it.
It’s a big tent.
I’m also annoyed with the 120 second wait. I don’t search posts very often, but when I do, it can take me 2 or 3 searches to find what I’m looking for. I know there were shorter limits in the past which I almost never ran into. I almost always run into the 120 second limit (it doesn’t usually take me two minutes to figure out if I found what I needed or need to do another search) and it is annoying. Very annoying.
Hi, I’m Cazzle and apparently I search too much.
I log in, I hit new posts and then I wonder what became of that one thread that I replied to but didn’t subscribe to so I search my old posts and get “You have to wait another 63 seconds before you can search again”.
I am so terribly sorry to have abused the board’s resources in this manner. :rolleyes:
An Arky, I agree with you 100%. Two minutes of waiting to use the board is an abuse of the members. Especiallly when two minutes is all the time it takes for the boards to time out again. I did not join these boards so I can do a timer in my head only to find out I was wrong by two seconds and have to do my search again.
We have a small group of members, so obviously there is a huge problem with the optimization of the software doing the searches. If it is the new posts search that is bringing the limping server to its knees, couldn’t the results of the search be saved every thirty seconds or so, and just copied to anyone who requests it?
Does anyone here ever go to any other message boards? Other boards I use (for free) allow non-member searches, and still manage to serve up pages fairly easily. The folks who love this place (including me) are in denial about how incredibly bad these boards run. And no, I’m not leaving. I put up with the crappiness for the awesome content. That doesn’t make the crappiness less crappy.
I would love to see the specs for the hardware and internet connection they’re using. (wonder if they’ve upgraded from the 486 to the pentium class yet)
I am a member of a MB that has a higher volume/thruput than the SDMB. On that boar Searches have been completely disabled for over a year now due to the performance hit.
Here’s another annoyance. My last hamster-taxing search was for all my past posts in order to take a little trip down memory lane (well, the parts that have not been erased, yet, anyway.) I got about 30 pages of results. I was reading through them, going from page to page, and then eventually I got errors telling me that the links to the pages on my search were no longer valid!
So, I searched again. Fortunately, it had been longer than two minutes. However, if I had been able to page through all my results like I’d wanted to, I could have saved a few hamsters by not doing another search.
Another thing I noticed as I looked through my old posts is just how many people are no longer here since the board went to pay. It is mind-boggling.
No doubt something could be done, but the administrators of this board don’t write the code. They’ve just bought off-the-shelf software.
Frankly, if you want better performance dumping PHP and MySQL are good first bets, but I’d bet that’s a total non-starter for a lot of reasons(not the least of which the fact that all of the good forum software is actual written in PHP… sigh)
Basically, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s not that I expect blazing performance or anything (I’ve been a member long enough to be disabused of that notion), it’s just that this is a very basic thing that plenty of other (ahem, FREE) boards seem to be able to do with aplomb.
Generally, I don’t mind waiting a few extra seconds for something to happen, it’s just that I KNOW it can be done better, and that’s what is irksome.
We’ve had a lot of very technically savvy dopers offer assistance to bring them out of the pre-Cambrian era of computing, we pay a pretty fair price for being members, and we’ve all heard the hyperbolic promises of what that “new server” would bring, yet nothing happens, and indeed, they dialed back meaningful user capability. Then they try that Irsay-ish sneaking in of screaming banner ads. It just doesn’t wash anymore.
I’m sorry some of you think I’m an idiot or have no patience, but really, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be dissatisfied with such halfassery.
Don’t you remember when that 2 minute time period was imposed, not long ago? It was thought that too-frequent searches were the causes of some serious timeouts and slowdowns, and this was invoked as a compromise (it was better than no searching at all).
AFAIK, the problem was never diagnosed completely and no more work is being done about it. Still, I’d hate for it to reoccur. 2 minutes between searches bothers me, too, but it may be a small price to pay for minimal harmony.
Spoken like a person who truly has no idea what he or she is talking about. Well done!
And regarding searches - disable the vBulletin search, and allow Google to index the site. Decrease the server load due to searches to zero and cut the database size in half at the same time.
I like it when I misjudge whether 2 minutes has passed since my last search and some bandwidth is wasted to tell me I have to wait one more second, which has already passed by the time I get the response. Why not just queue the search for one second, honest I won’t be able to tell.
Spoken like a person who misses the point completely. Christ Jesus, people, all I ever ask from you idiots is a little bit of perspective. It’s 2 minutes! Take a piss! Make a pop tart! Don’t be so vain that you think some idiot may have responded to your oh so witty response in the last thirty seconds. Perspective.
You see boys and girls, it turned out that a single member searching once every 30 seconds for 4 minutes is what passes for a denial of service attack in these parts. They instituted the 2 minute search rule back in April because somebody managed to shut down the boards by accident.
Post in which Ed explains the change.
I will point out that I had to seach twice to get that thread. The first time I searched for jerry, search and minute and came up with only one thread, which was the wrong one. When I excluded the term jerry I got a whole bunch of threads, one of which was the one I was looking for. Oddly the original post contains both the words jerry and minute and has seach in the title and scattered through the thread, but that didn’t appear. Wonders will never cease.
Why have I never noticed what an asshole you are before this? Let me make this simple for you: some people have restricted time to spend on the internet. I know, it’s hard to believe, but it really is true. If I have half an hour to surf the boards on my break, and I have to do 5 searches to find what I’m looking for (it has happened), forget it. That post is not going to get made. Not all searches are vanity searches and looking for recent responses. Some of them are necessary to composing a well-supported post.
I know, cry you a fucking river. You wouldn’t miss that post anyway, whatever. So you don’t give a shit that it bothers people. But in the aggregate, the board gets less content, well-researched content for sure, and people are turned off from participating. Hell, I’m sure many people have walked away because of the shitty service that now costs money. It’s a valid complaint.
Now go make yourself a pop tart and get some perspective on that.
Just out of idle curiousity, how many would be willing to get more frequent and faster searches in exchange for banner ads?