Sticky request for Cafe Society

[EllisDee]

I recently discovered that when you put a word in quotes, it doesn’t show up in thread title searches. This is a particular issue for Cafe Society.

As an easy example, if you do a search in Cafe Society (thread titles only) for “Episodes” – with or without quotes in your search criteria – you will not find this thread:

New Showtime Series: “Episodes” Starring Matt LeBlanc

I discovered this originally last week when I finally saw Inception and did a title search for it to see the SDMB discussion. I was puzzled that only a few short threads showed up, since I figured it would be the kind of movie dopers would love to dissect. Only when I read through some of them did I find a link to the actual discussion thread:

The “I’ve seen INCEPTION” thread (spoilers inevitable)

That didn’t show up on a title search for Inception because of the closing quote. Apparently, when thread titles are indexed, any word touching a quote gets ignored. So you have to do a full search, and then you get a ton of false positives.

Any chance we could get a notice put up, like a sticky, letting people know that quotes make their threads unsearchable? Or better yet, a policy of editing thread titles to add a space between words and the quotes that enclose them?

Just something to think about.

[Skammer]

If this notice is posted, it should probably include instructions for searching the forum/board using Google which will give you better results.

[MsWhatsit]

Wow, I had no idea. I’ll second the request in the OP.

[twickster]

Yeah, we can do that.

I personally, however, cannot do that right this second because I’m at work. Look for it within the next day or so.

twickster, Cafe Society moderator

[twickster]

Here ya go.

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

@EllisDee

I recently discovered that when you put a word in quotes, it doesn’t show up in thread title searches. This is a particular issue for Cafe Society.

As an easy example, if you do a search in Cafe Society (thread titles only) for “Episodes” – with or without quotes in your search criteria – you will not find this thread:

New Showtime Series: “Episodes” Starring Matt LeBlanc

What you can do is do a title search on episodes. It will find any character string that contains the substring episodes (regardless of case). That’s often what I do when I use the search function, because AFAICT any punctuation will tend to trip the search algorithm.

@twickster

Here ya go.

I think you mean [thread=594577]this[/thread].

[twickster]

@Hypnagogic_Jerk

I think you mean [thread=594577]this[/thread].

:smack:

Right you are. I fixed in my post.

[twickster]

@Hypnagogic_Jerk

What you can do is do a title search on episodes. It will find any character string that contains the substring episodes (regardless of case). That’s often what I do when I use the search function, because AFAICT any punctuation will tend to trip the search algorithm.

And thanks for this info – I added to the sticky.

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

@Hypnagogic_Jerk

What you can do is do a title search on episodes. It will find any character string that contains the substring episodes (regardless of case). That’s often what I do when I use the search function, because AFAICT any punctuation will tend to trip the search algorithm.

Correct, and this is not just for Cafe Society, but any search in any forum. An apostrophe, parenthesis, exclamation point, question mark can eliminate a candidate from a search. < beer? > will not show up in a search on < beer >. Safest is to use the li’l asterisk; searching on < beer* > gets anything.