In the last couple weeks, I’ve searched for two different threads that appear to be completely gone. The first time, I figured it was a fluke, but just now I searched for a different one and it’s gone too.
What’s the percentage on threads lost, roughly?
The thread I was searching for tonight was titled “Spoil Gattaga for me”. I happened to watch Gattaga last night for the first time in years. I had responded to that thread with a pretty good description of the movie (IMO), and having finally seen the movie again I wanted to check and see how good my description really was.
If the thread isn’t lost, could a kind soul please link to it here? Thanks much.
It’s not Gattaga, it’s Gattaca. 
FTR, I recently searched for a Pit thread (pitting the Salamander font from a free site) and can’t seem to find it anywhere! I’ve since found the site but not the thread.
Hey! When I signed on, they assured me that ties would go to the mods. 
Simulpost. 
It’s ties now? It used to be coffee cups.
Um, I notice I’m not in that thread. While I admit to being sheepish about that spelling error, I also searched for all posts made by me at any time containing the word “Vincent” and came up empty.
I’m fairly surprised that there is another thread with the same title. I placed a reasonably long summary in a spoiler box. Does search not work on spoiled text?
So is that the actual thread, but somehow my post was lost? Or is there a completely different thread that is completely lost?
Also, the OP that I remember was frantic because he lost cable or power or something and was digging the movie when it suddenly cut out. The OP in the linked thread seemed to dislike it.
Am I losing my mind?
Hey, looking at that thread, I see that chique was the OP of the thread I remember, which he linked to:
For the love of god, please spoil Gattaca for me
Now, first off, hooray! That’s what I wanted.
But this brings up a question: why can’t I search for this thread? Again, search for all posts ever written by Ellis Dee with the word Vincent, and it comes up empty, yet I clearly wrote the word Vincent in that thread.
Also, BoringDad (in the thread you guys linked) specifically mentions that the “For the love of…” thread didn’t appear in his search, either.
What gives? Anybody have any guesses?
The vB search engine has always been wonky. We’re not sure why it’s so clunky, it just is. However, we’re grateful we have one that halfway works.
Sorry you’re not getting exactly what you want here.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Fair enough, as a programmer I can accept that answer.
The search works great in those rare times I use it…maybe once or twice a month. Just my bad luck that the last two searches I tried were on threads that fell out of the index.
Thanks much for the response, Tuba.
I have noticed one thing about the search engine that you might find helpful. I’m not sure if it affects your particular search, but it has affected a lot of mine.
If you look for a word, and don’t do a wildcard search (ie, you don’t add a “*” at the beginning or end), the search is only going to look for that word with a space before and after it.
Specifically, the search will not find that word if it is around punctuation. So, if you are looking for “Vincent”, it might find “… and Vincent went to …”, but it won’t find the post that has “… and his name was Vincent.”, because of the period. Same if the word was followed (or immediately preceded) by a comma, colon, semi-colon, dash, quotes, whatever.
It took me a while to learn this. Adding the asterisk at the end turns up the ones with punctuation, as well as the others.
I haven’t figured out if this is also true of carriage returns, bold tags, and the like, so that would be another area of experimentation to look at if someone wants.
NE Texan, I didn’t know that.
Single quotes are handled oddly. Searching on friends returns that and friend’s!
A quick test showed that bolded strings turn up even if you don’t use wildcards.