Google shows what, eight or ten hits at a time, even if there are more?
Google shows me as many as fit on the page, usually 8 or 9. The gooooooogle at the bottom of the page used to give me a sense of how many more there are. Maybe that doesn’t work any more. Google has certainly made a lot of changes to how it presents search results.
The search results pop-up in Discourse always shows 5 results and a “More …” link below the fifth result.
If it’s a search in thread, and “More …” is clicked, it grows the pop-up to full window height, adds a scroll bar, and turns it into another dynamic-loading infinite scroll thingie.
If it’s not a search in thread, and “More …” is clicked, it triggers a whole new new full-size page that lists as many hits as fit, adds a scroll bar, and turns it into another dynamic-loading infinite scroll thingie.
But if course! How disxourse-esque.
Well, that’s probably not how i would have chosen to do it, but that’s certainly not broken.
I’ve made two subsequent discoveries.
The first is that the auto-fill function works s l o w l y. If I type “Puzzlegal” in quickly, in the “posted by” box, I get “no results found”. But if I enter each letter and pause a bit, with each letter I get a different suggested name. By the time I finish, it is auto-filling the full name.
The second thing is that it looks like Discourse remembers what I’ve searched. When I made my previous experiments, it didn’t bring up “Puzzlegal” as an option. Now it does. It seems to be training itself to remember my past searches. Other names that I’ve frequently searched also come up quickly. If it’s the first time I’ve searched a particular name, not so much.
Windows 10, Firefox, and SD Light
On the subject of username autocomplete (unless I’m misunderstanding the context here) the “@” syntax brings up a popup of candidate usernames as you start typing, and this list (which changes as you type more letters) has not ever included the name that I want. Not once, ever. For example, typing @\T, I get
- t, DemonTree, tomsdiner, topfishing, tavalla, and Two_Many_Cats2 after the first “T”,
- tr, TrashDragon, Triner, Trigger1, Dbug, and deltogre after typing “Tr”,
- Triner, Trigger1, and ghelaii after typing “Tri”,
- Trip after typing “Trip”,
- And then nothing at all with “Tripl”.
Yet folks upthread are saying that many usernames like “Tripler” autocomplete for them. Maybe they’re talking about the search function. I’m talking about the username suggestions associated with the @ function. It’s completely useless.
When I type the @ I get a pop-up of @Discobot, @CairoCarol, @wolfpup, @SCAdian, @erysichthon, and @BigT.
Those are all posters for whom I’ve used the “@” function in the past. (except Discobot! Boo! Hiss! Bad cess be on ye!)
When I first started using Discourse, the suggestions were all posters I’d never heard of.
I think the more you use it, the more you train it.
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
Interesting. When I just type the “@” by itself, I do get usernames of familiar posters that I’ve probably responded to. But as soon as I type any letter, I start getting entirely posters that I’ve never heard of and definitely never responded to. And the familiar posters disappear even if the letter(s) entered match their username.
So the function may somewhat work if you just type “@”, where it comes up with a list of some posters you’ve responded to in the past. But as soon as you type any qualifying letters, it all goes to hell and its suggestions are invariably useless.
That’s not my experience. The initial letter I type always brings up one or two posters I recognise.
I’m using a fairly recent vanilla version of Firefox, so pretty mainstream.
It’s not a big problem for me, but just rather odd behaviour.
Yes, this is my experience as well. Let’s see, if I type @w I get a menu with these choices:
W w.
Wjchia
WolfpackJeep
WOOKINPANUBv2
Whale
WalterBishop
The only name I recognize is WOOKINPANUB and I’m not sure about the v2.
This is my experience, too. Completely useless. Search is pretty useless, too.
After dealing with those timeouts, any upgrade would’ve been welcomed. But this is actually working. Thanks to TubaDiva and her many magnificent minions.
I’m posting more (and reading a ton more) now. But that’s partly Discourse, partly Covid, but mostly Retirement.
My experience with @ autocomplete is the same as @wolfpup & @puzzlegal say. The first letter might bring up somebody from the current thread, but after that it’s names I’ve never heard of. This applies wherever it’s used, be that in a search box or in a post.
As I pointed out in some other post probably in this thread, only about 1% of the total user database are “active” by any reasonable definition. So if the search is just a database lookup with a default order of oldest to newest and a limit of the first 5, it’s no wonder we think it’s wacko. If that’s how it works, it’d always prefer somebody not seen since 2001 over someone who posted yesterday.
And yes, once you get about 3 letters in there it fails completely.
@LSLGuy , thank you for answering questions on the search function. I’ve learned a lot from your answers. I went from being unable to find anything and giving up on search on Discourse to finding most of what I wanted in the past couple days and even finding something I hadn’t been able to find on vBulletin.
I have a couple more questions, if you don’t mind. I’m hoping to find a way to easily find if a person has posted in a thread. Let’s say that I want to know if you’ve posted in a particular thread. I know that I could go to the OP and look at the list of icons and scroll over each one to see if I found your name or if I could identify your avatar. Is there any other way to do that?
I’d also like to know if there’s a way to find all the topics (threads) someone has started between two dates. I don’t think vBulletin could do this, but I can see the date range in Discourse, so I was hopeful there might be a way to configure a search to find this. I’m looking for a way to find the threads a poster started between, say 2004-2007 without having to scroll through the whole list of threads they’ve started from their profile.
Thanks again for your help. The search function has become a lot more helpful for me after reading your posts on the subject here.
Click on the search icon at the top, and check ‘Search this topic’. Enter @Username and after a pause of a second or two it will provide a dropdown list of their posts in the thread. You can click on one to jump there, and then go back to the search box and click on another.
Also, if you see someone’s avatar anywhere in the thread, you can click on it, then on the filter button (‘x posts in topic’). It will then show only that person’s posts in the thread, which can be very useful. But it won’t work if the user’s profile is hidden. Yes, I’m looking at you, Heffalump!
You can do this with the operator ‘in:first’ which shows the topics they’ve started.:
@Username in:first after:2003 before:2008
More generally:
@Username in:first after:yyyy-mm-dd before:yyyy-mm-dd
If you want both before and after dates, you have to type the dates in manually, because the boxes in the advanced search only allow you to do one or the other.
ETA: @GreenWyvern ninja’d most of what I was had written but got interrupted before posting.
So I’ll continue w just my conclusion.
…
Ref any of the user searches you need to be able to correctly spell the name of the poster you’re seeking. That’s sometimes a problem for people.
All these options as @GreenWyvern explained are available from the advanced search page. Click the magnifying glass, then click “options” at the right of the popup. That brings up the advanced search page. All the various choices down the right side just inject text into the search input textbox at upper left. When you click the magnifying glass at the right of that search input textbox it will process whatever is in the search input textbox.
The gotcha is that some parts of that UI on the right are flaky.
It assumes you’re using Tab to move from item to item, and pressing Tab is the signal to push whatever you selected via dropdown or checkbox or whatever into the search box. So sometimes you can make entry(s) in the options on right but they don’t transfer to the textbox. Which goof will make it seem like the search results aren’t respecting your choices. It always respects the choices as shown in the search textbox; that may not always reflect the last item you updated in the options on the right. Forewarned is forearmed.
I’ve since learned what the text inputs are for the features I use all the time. Which are mostly the 4 you asked about. I just keystroke them directly into the search input textbox without bothering w the dropdowns, checkboxes, etc., UI on the right.
Thank you! This is great.
That didn’t work for me, but using the username without the @ works so that’s all good.
That leads me to another question. I’m looking at your posts in this thread. They’re numbered from 1 to however many posts you did in the thread. I found the post I want, and now I want to know what post number it is in the thread and go back to the original thread view. How do I do that without losing your post in the thread?
Whoa, this is like magic. It would not have occurred to me that threads started would be searched by first post since in vBulletin the first post is the one generally after the OP.
I’m guessing that I can find the commands by checking one of the boxes and looking at the command, then later I can just type it in without having to configure the panel.
Thank you to you and @GreenWyvern (search function worked for me here) for all your help.