That’s not what i think of as the “search functionality”. Also, in vbulletin, if you clicked on the number of thread posts, shown on the list of threads, you got a nice little list of every person who posted to the thread, and how many times. Click on that for a person, and you got all of that person’s posts in the thread. I used to use that a lot. And it’s pretty similar to what you are describing.
But anyway, my issue is when i CAN’T see the poster. I’ve had issues trying to write private messages, trying to find something a person wrote, all sorts of stuff because it doesn’t do boo unless i spell the name exactly correctly, every letter. And it looks like it ought to help me find people, because it will pull up one or two random poster names as i type, but it’s never yet shown me the name I’m looking for. I really hate it.
I’m not good at remembering names or spelling. That was never a problem in vbulletin.
Look at the box immediately below the first post in the thread, with all the stats.
If you click the arrow at the side you get a full list of every person who posted in the thread and the number of posts for each person. Click on a person’s icon and then on the filter button, and you can see all the posts by that person in the thread.
There’s certainly an issue in Discourse with typing in partial user names in a search.
However, you can get a useful list of users by going to the hamburger menu and clicking ‘users’.
You can choose a time period (today, this week, etc.), and sort by number of replies to get the most active users, or by username to get an alphabetical list. There’s a name filter, but it also seems a bit problematic.
What I’ve noticed when using the @ function is that it has priority problems and issues going past certain characters.
If you just type @ by itself, it will show a list of people in the thread, which makes sense, as you’re most likely going to be pinging someone in the thread. But if you start typing any other letter, then it seems to completely forget that, and instead just goes through the entire list of members with names that start with those letters, stopping after it gets to a certain number. The priority system should prefer posters in the thread first, followed by posters who are currently active, only then falling back to alphabetical order.
It also seems to have an issue where it will not search a name with an underscore (_) unless you’ve typed at least one underscore. For example, if I type @What, I get only one poster as an option. It’s only if I type @What_ that the mod What_Exit shows up. Similarly, I must type @Really_ to see the poster Really_Not_All_That_Bright.
Those are the flaws I’ve noticed in the system. It seems weird to me that no one has brought them up before our board came along. Maybe most boards aren’t as big as ours.
Yeah, that was my point. Someone says, “i really like the search function here” and i said, “huh, broken for me”, and they said, “i can do this neat thing”, and i said, “i could do that in vbulletin”
As best as i can tell, the search function here is just broken. It looks like it tries to suggest options, but it fails. And it fails (for me) every single time. I am extremely frustrated by it.
I was going to say the same thing. When I try to @ someone, it suggests some random person who hasn’t logged on since dinosaurs were using Nokia phones, instead of the poster in that very thread whose name starts with the same letter. And when I type more letters, it stops suggesting anyone and I have to waste time looking up how to spell their name. It’s broken.
Yes, the @ … autocomplete is broken. Whether in the search input box or in a post. I suspect what’s mostly wrong with it is that once you get past the initial pop-up of the 5 most prolific posters in the thread, it defaults to “all registered users”. Which for us is 95% dead users.
A big thing I noticed is it usually behaves better if you type slowly enough for it to keep up. Type @ and wait a half-second for the dropdown to populate. See what you want? Click it. Don’t see what you want? Type the next letter and wait a half-second for the dropdown to populate.
If you keep going, eventually it will start picking up names that don’t start with those letters, but that include those letters. Which can be helpful when you almost know how to spell it. But it won’t find all such matches.
All autocomplete systems (and spellcheckers) suffer if you can’t spell the first couple of letters of whatever you’re looking for
It’s very clear you’re really frustrated. We’d like to help.
I substantially never have any malfunction with search. I can drag up threads I vaguely remember from 15 years ago the first time, almost every time. Whether by content, by title, or by poster.
There is some mismatch between your mental model and theirs. You have nothing to loose but your frustration. Help us help you.
Other than the @ problem, please give us a specific example of “I wanted to do this, so I tried to do this, that, and the other thing and the results I got sucked because …”
I wanted to send a pm to someone, but didn’t exactly remember their name. I tried starting a pm and typed some letters. I typed the first couple of letters, and got a short, changing (as i typed) and totally useless list of names I eventually found a thread I’d remembered interacting with him in, and just scrolled down it until i found one of his posts.
I had a zoom chat with a doper who told me about a third party i might interested in. I tried in vain to look that person up. I tried the “search for people” function (from the menu you get from clicking your icon). I typed the first couple of letters, and got a short, changing (as i typed) and totally useless list of names. I tried some interior letters, in case i had the wrong first letter. No dice. I eventually got fed up and emailed the person I’d been talking to asking for the spelling of the person’s name.
In both cases, i had enough of the name that i would have easily found the poster in vbulletin.
Yeah. You’re 100% right that searching for partial or misspelled user names in Discourse is just about 100% impossible. Using either Discourse’s search or Google’s search.
Discourse’s search will readily find in-text references to my name given search text of “LSL”, “LSLG”, or “LSLGu” regardless of upper/lower case. And regardless of whether I’m mentioned with or without the @.
But it won’t find any posts written by me, except the few where I mention my own user name in the body text. To find posts by somebody you need to have @ and the full correct name, e.g. “@LSLGuy”.
As well, Discourse search will not find any partial word by interior characters.
So it won’t find in-post mentions of “SLG” taken from the middle of my name. But equally, a search for “one” won’t find any of the thousands of posts containing some non-username word with “one” in the middle. Such as “postpone”, “hone”, etc. But it will find “onerous”, “oneway”, etc.
Google works the same way.
I did just find something interesting about the “Users” page from the hamburger menu. When I first display it, I’m included along with 18 other people and there is no infinite scroll; when you scroll to #19, that’s all there is. Filtering by username at upper right does the same; no infinite scroll. But if I click any column header to sort, suddenly I get the full results with infinite scroll.
And yes, the results are fouled up in a weird unpredictable way. Users are found or not found more or less at random.
I now wonder if there’s a database problem in our user table that persists because we lack a technically capable admin and we lack a dev since we chased him off.
Per the “About” page we have 209K users. Of whom 144 have logged on in the last 30 days. The active users represent roughly 1 in 2000 = 0.05% of the total. That’s a real crappy wheat/chaff ratio.
Just to be clear, i don’t believe coding horror was ever responsible in any capacity for our site, nor did he have administrative credentials. He was just a member who happened to be one of the authors of discourse. He answered a lot of questions. But i think one of the things that drove him off was that people thought he could do something about the issues we had. And other than changing discourse for the whole world, he couldn’t.
Agreed. Many of us tried to stop the pile-on, but it was too late.
In any case, I find it hard to believe that user search is operating as designed on SDMB. Something is wonky. I’m not suggesting that it would necessarily cover your use case if it was operating as designed; it may still be a weak design.
But the current symptoms are so deeply buggy they make me think of data pollution, rather than crappy QA. Which pollution may have come from the import from vBulletin or may be subsequent.
My bottom line: something is broken in Denmark Doperland.
I don’t believe those those figures. It shows only 34 users in the past week (!) and 12.5k posts, an average of over 50 posts per user per day.
But if you go to the user page and sort by number of replies and scroll down, you get a lot more users than that - I’ve made a rough estimate of about 1080 users who have posted in the past week.
My guess is that the About page may be showing the number who actually logged in, but not counting the number who remained logged in.
There’s a difference between a bug report and folks wailing that “your product is not identical to the old product, so you MUST modify your product to our desires or our community is lost, Lost I tell you!” Or, “Your product is so wrong for our use we should switch back immediately.”
If we had avoided triggering the flounce-out we would still have an asset we could submit a bug report to. Who could then say “Not a bug; by design, suck it up”, or “Not a bug; you’ve got a wonky database, have your admin perform the XYZ repair script”.
Instead we got 'nuthin. Which would matter less if we had a generic IT-capable admin. Of @Ed_Zotti’s many redeeming features, IT nous seems not to be one of them.
I’ve given up on using the search function here. That’s completely solved my search problems.
My board habits have completely changed now. When I drop in here these days, I just read the titles of all the threads in my preferred forums that have been added to since my last visit, open any that tickle my fancy, do my reading/posting, and move on.
I do spend a lot less time here as a result, but it’s much les frustrating for me.
Continuing on broken user search, I followed @GreenWyvern’s link to the test site which has far fewer users than we do. Making searching for users a bit easier.
Fascinating. On your user page under the Preferences -> Account section there’s a box labeled “Name”. Which many of us use, vBulletin style, not as our IRL name, but as some cute motto. Mine says “Semi-retired”.
I learned that Discourse includes what you type in that “Name” field as something to match on when filtering for a user. So on the hamburger menu “Users” page, if you filter for “ret” you’ll find two people whose username starts with “ret”, and you’ll find me because my “Name” field contains the string “ret” as the start of the second ‘word’ according to that parser.
So some of the stuff I was labeling “database pollution” might just be people being retrieved by data in other fields besides just their login username.
I’m afraid I don’t understand the difficulties people are having with the search function. It seems to work fine for me. It’s different from the old boards, but once I got used to it, it works.
Autocomplete for names works as well, as long as you never hit a space. That negates your typing an you have a blank. Have to use _ in place of a space.
When I’m looking for a post by a poster, I don’t use the @ at all. I go to advanced options and fill in the name of the poster I’m looking for, and the software fills it in.
