Feature request:search this thread

[tmf]

Hi,

recently I was browsing ubuntu forums, and noticed a small feature - search this thread. I think it would be very useful here.

What do you think?

tmf

[tmf]

One more thing - I'd encourage you to write why you think it would be useful or not. To be first - many times I've seen situation, where people post their problem in huge thread, and get response like "look on the third page of this thread, it's solved there". Ability to effectively search thread (and willing to do search) would cut that situation off.

tmf

[pjp]

Without feedback, I'd ignore anyone voting no... they're probably just being contrary. I can't think of a functional reason to not implement some form of the feature.

[Shadow Skill]

I think it would be a great feature, I would love to use such a thing on some of the larger threads.

[batistuta]

Every time I search for something like "vnc gcc4", then I get as an match the gcc threads (among others). The problem is that these threads have hundred of posts spreaded around several pages. How could I know in which page was my keyword found? It would take too much time to go through all 24 pages and every possible thread...
Thanks

[Akhouk]

From "Quick search" you can choose to search "posts" rather than "topics".

[sinetific]

I'm not sure if this has been recommended yet or not, but when searching clicking the link to a post always lands you on the first page of the thread instead of the page on which the term you searched for appears. Many posts in the forum are 30+ pages. This makes finding the information you're looking for quite cumbersome.
It would be nice if searching for the term took you to the exact post it was in instead of the first post in the thread. Is this a possibility or maybe I'm just missing some obvious functionality of the board that already does this.

[kallamej]

Yes, this has been mentioned loads of times, and the answer is, as always, to select Display results as: Posts from the search page.

[silverpig]

I love these forums. Every single time I have a problem (whether it be with gentoo, or the forum search) the solution is always posted here

[Da Fox]

although that works (but not great) I often find that I want to search for a certain term in the current thread, for example to see if something has been mentioned before, or if someone says 'yeah, that's been mentioned a couple of pages back'. In such a case it would be very usefull to be able to search within the current thread, instead of going through the entire forum.
Practical example:
When I had a firefox question a while back (I am having a problem with the adblock extension) I first searched the forums for my problem using rather specific terms, which didn't give any usefull results. I then had to go through every page of the 'Firefox 1.5 problems' thread to look for the word 'adblock' which took ages, whereas if I could just have searched the 'Firefox 1.5 problems' thread for the word 'adblock' I would have been done in seconds.
So please, put in a 'seach within this thread' option ^^

[Taladar]

I am sure most of you had the problem before:

In the Gentoo Forums we have lots of long threads with 10+ pages.
The search feature just shows you which threads contain your search keywords.
Sometimes the threads are way too long to search by hand.
It should be easy for someone skilled PHP to extend the search feature to show the exact post in the search results.

Do you think Gentoo should do something like this?

Edit: Poll ate the fourth option (it was the first poll I created). Of course the other combination is also possible.

[/dev/random]

Other forums have a search in thread feature (Ubuntu forums come to mind). I think it's some sort of limitation of phpbb, but I could be completely wrong. If it is I think we'll have to live with it because changing from phpbb would be too much of a pain and could result in lost threads and other such nasty things.

[Tasslehoff]

a couple things you can do is use google to search the forum or have the results displayed as posts rather then subjects.

[revertex]

try google.

just use someting like this

Code: Select all

vnc gcc4 site:forums.gentoo.org

[omp]

Go to the Search page and set Display results as: to Posts instead of Topics.

[HydroSan]

The search on these forums are is so unreliable. I just use Google and tell it to hit only forums.gentoo.org.

[Taladar]

I really can't see why I never noticed that. I mostly use the Quick Search but I should have looked on the Search page first of course.

Thanks omp.

[Da Fox]

anyone who says "Go to the Search page and set Display results as: to Posts instead of Topics." clearly hasn't read my previous post :/

[revertex]

anyone who says "Go to the Search page and set Display results as: to Posts instead of Topics." clearly hasn't read my previous post :/

It's what happen when someone write more than ten words

[pblinux]

Go to the Search page and set Display results as: to Posts instead of Topics.

Here is a specific example for those who don't understand:

I bought an Inspiron 6000 laptop. DVD playback is choppy by default. I want to find the specific posts that address this problem. I can display as posts or as topics.

-"As topics" yields the gargantuan "Inspiron 6000" thread with hundreds of posts, mostly irrelevant to the problem.
-"As posts" yields hundreds of posts that are totally irrelevant to Inspiron 6000 hardware.

What I want to do is search only the "Inspiron 6000" thread for "choppy dvd". I want to get just the handful of posts relevant to my problem and my hardware.

Understand?

[pblinux]

Yes, this has been mentioned loads of times, and the answer is, as always, to select Display results as: Posts from the search page.

If that's the final answer, then I have a new request: When searching using "Display results as Posts", a feature that lets us search through the search results to find posts belonging to a specific thread.

In a nutshell, "Display results as Posts" is not a useful solution to this problem.

[Archangel1]

Yes, this has been mentioned loads of times, and the answer is, as always, to select Display results as: Posts from the search page.

If that's the final answer, then I have a new request: When searching using "Display results as Posts", a feature that lets us search through the search results to find posts belonging to a specific thread.

In a nutshell, "Display results as Posts" is not a useful solution to this problem.

I agree, the phpBB search is too inaccurate - you get hundreds of results that vaguely match your terms ranked before the ones that are accurate, because it seems to mostly be ranked on post date. If you have a specific problem that involves, say, Xgl, the solution (if there is one) is pretty much bound to be on one of two threads, but using search by posts always seems to pull in results from heaps of others.

[kallamej]

Yes, this has been mentioned loads of times, and the answer is, as always, to select Display results as: Posts from the search page.

If that's the final answer, then I have a new request: When searching using "Display results as Posts", a feature that lets us search through the search results to find posts belonging to a specific thread.

In a nutshell, "Display results as Posts" is not a useful solution to this problem.

Please note that this thread consists of some merged threads, but the one who merged them didn't leave a notice about it. The post you quoted was a reply to the post directly above it, which was in a new thread at the time. So no, that is not the final answer. There is a new search engine in the works, but there is still far from finished.

[cokey]

I dont see why another search for threads would be bad. It would be especially good if there was a way to block out the "non searchable" items and words because you would only be searching a thread

[tomk]

I dont see why another search for threads would be bad. It would be especially good if there was a way to block out the "non searchable" items and words because you would only be searching a thread

Searching a specific topic would be easily doable and I'll include it with the new search engine. Bypassing the search stopwords will not be possible as they prevent the words from being indexed as the extra data needed to allow searching them makes a drastic hit on performance. We will however be having another look at the list before the new search engine is released.