Why, when I’m going through the 30 pages of “New Posts” do I suddenly get the following “Bulletin Message”:
“Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.”
and then lose all of the remaining new reply pages? It’s happening every session now.
This is because searches expire more quickly now than they used to, so there’s not enough time to go through all of the new posts before it expires. The admins are already aware of this, and it doesn’t look likely that anything will be done about it.
Also, posts like this should go in the ATMB forum in the future.
Moving this to ATMB, where you should get some additional info.
samclem GQ moderator
I see this is going to be one of those ongoing questions.
Please see the current thread on the situation:
How come I can’t refresh my search results . . .
And this one, which I think I’m gonna sticky:
I would particularly draw your attention to this note from jdavis, our advisor in all things tech:
"I assume this is an issue with system timeouts . . . "
I’m sorry we don’t have a better answer for you. It’s a vB issue we can do nothing about.
your humble TubaDiva
I can’t help wondering, as a non-tech type of guy, if this is something much more fundamental.
Yes, this is kinda anecdotal, so apologies there, but my experience of message boards over the years is that the search function sucks. Pure and simple. The SDMB’s has never been very good, and search functionality on a range of message boards I visit is likewise. These boards run on a variety of software platforms, not only vBulletin, yet they all have the same flaky search. Sometimes it works, often it doesnt. Many is the time when I’ve known exact key words or phrases, I’ve been 100% sure of the forum the thread was in, and I’ve even known the date reasonably accurately, but the search has come up with zip.
To me, it seems there is something intrinsic about the way message boards assemble their data (in comparison to the HTML on more “hard-wired” sites) that is just a little beyond the capabilities of search technology as it currently stands. If you want to see what I mean, go to Google and do a vanity search of your username. I tried this, and having a post count in the thousands on multiple boards I got a list of very strange search results comprised of a few seemingly random threads, over a long time frame, from those boards.
I really suspect there is more to this than a currently acute vBulletin problem (which is not to say that the particular problem mentioned by others doesn’t exist and add to the woes).
Probably so. The SDMB disallow in the coding of their pages, as I seem to recall, the access for 'bots like Google’s to cache pages for keyword searches outside the SDMB. Could be that the SDMB’s search engine, like that of some other boards, doesn’t lend itself readily to the traditional keyword search format.
I’ve noticed this too, and am using a “workaround.” After I get all the new posts, I start reading them from the LAST page and working my way forward. That way, when the “no matches” message comes up, I do “new posts” again, and hopefully don’t lose too much of what I had to begin with. 'Tis frustrating, though.
Sorry about posting in the wrong forum. Thank you, MLS, and all the others. I’ll try your suggestion and then I guess I’ll just go to each different forum of interest and peruse until the time out, then go back again to continue.
I use Mozilla, so my technique is to immediately open each page of quiery results in it’s own tab.