When I return to the message board, I often search for recent posts by myself to get up-to-date on the threads I’m involved in. Usually, I forget to set the post age (“Search For Posts From…”) from its default of “yesterday” to “a week ago”, which is more appropriate for my board frequency. So, no posts found, I search again with the longer time frame. The response invariably is:
“Sorry! The administrator has specified that you can only do one search every 30 seconds.”
I have a couple of questions regarding this policy. If either is beyond the scope of ATMB, please let me know. The answers will probably only be known to adminstrators.
First, is the ratio of search queries to other queries (such as ordinary page fetches) high enough that this policy significantly reduces the load on the server? I wouldn’t expect that there would be so many searches.
Second, pressing the “Perform Search” button, under normal circumstances, sends me to an intermediate page that informs me that my search is underway. I am then redirected to the search results. Pressing said button before the 30s timeout brings me to an error page. Would it be possible to turn the error page into an intermediate page that delays the appropriate amount of time before continuing the search? That way I wouldn’t have to sit and wait while my search is being performed; I could multitask (there are other threads to read!) and allow the search to wait for the timeout, search, and return the results.
Comments? Do other people have this problem? Would other people like this solution?
While I am not either a MOD nor a computer geek, the Reason that you can’t search more frequently than every 30 seconds is to prevent spammers from posting. If the board were programmed to send you to an “intermediate page” it would still allow spammers to enter.
Searches have shown to be a significant load on the server in the past.
Eliminating the intermediate screen - we very rarely (almost never) do custom modifications to the canned software that is used to run the board.
There was some discussion of the intermediate screens on the vBulletin forums, both for the Search function and the normal posting function. Apparently, IIRC, eliminating the intermediate screen is Bad, although I will not go out on a limb (due to my poor memory) and say why exactly.
Searching takes a huge amount of CPU power and disk swapping, if you don’t have enough memory or you haven’t cached enough. On my Board (where the server sits about 4 feet away from me), the difference between a “post” and a “Search” can be as much as 10:1 to 15:1 in terms of time. Also, it spikes the CPU graph to “50%” to “75%”, or higher, while doing a single Search. Then again, my Server is wimpy.
Arnold, thanks for the search load info. You’re implying that the canned software cannot do what I suggested; fair enough. The administrators have better things to worry about than rewriting the software.
Anthracite, I’m not suggesting the elimination of the intermediate screens, rather the incorporation of the 30s timeout on posting a subsequent search into the intermediate screen rather than supplying a dead-end error message. I haven’t spent any time on the vBulletin fora; do you think it would be worthwhile for me to advance my suggestion there? Or can I direct the vBulletin people’s attention here?
Well, you can certainly give it a shot. But be warned that the vBulletin Board is often insanely busy, and they get umpteen millions of suggestions, which have been hashed out so many times that the Mods and programmers seem angry a lot of the time…
Actually I think what samclem was thinking of is the policy that you can’t post twice in 30 seconds (or is it a minute?) Spammers could easily take advantage of that (and do at other boards.)
