new search stopwords list

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Lepaca Kliffoth · Post by **Lepaca Kliffoth** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:46 pm

I don't know if you guys realize it and I haven't read the thread, but the stopword madness is making the forum useless. I'm having the old hated "could open default font fixed" error and I remember I have to re-emerge a package to get rid of it but I can't remember which one. I have to use google and find the solution somewhere else when I know it's already here because every word is refused except "font". This is beyond ridiculous.

DaysSinceTheDoor · Post by **DaysSinceTheDoor** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 5:38 pm

I am so sick of this I am actually planning on setting up one of our companies servers to run ht://dig against the forums. If our server can handle the bandwidth I might actually make it publicly available.

We use Gentoo on just about all of our major servers. When a I get some sort of a cryptic error either during an update or configuration of a new package I have to go to google and type "site:forums.gentoo.org ERROR_MESSAGE". The only problem with this is that you are limited to the threads posted before google last crawled (thus my own search engine). The funny thing is when I do this I usually find a number of posts that are basically the same error over and over again. I think that this attempt to keep the index files from getting huge was a complete waste of time on the part of the forums maintainers as it has probably led to far more duplicates than just about anything else. Rather than asking the community to help out and provide storage or extra computers to handle the load of the forums, they choose to cripple them.

pilla · Post by **pilla** » Wed Sep 19, 2007 6:48 pm

DaysSinceTheDoor wrote:I am so sick of this I am actually planning on setting up one of our companies servers to run ht://dig against the forums. If our server can handle the bandwidth I might actually make it publicly available.

We will block the entire IP block and notify your boss if necessary, banning you as well.

VinnieNZ · Post by **VinnieNZ** » Wed Oct 03, 2007 10:55 pm

Argh, this thread is now three years old and still no real solution.

Using Google is useless, it throws too many unhelpful results, separated as one result per post, not per thread! And you don't know whether or not they are going to be any help, as they don't provide enough information in the preview.

The stop words muck up all searches now, even when using non common words related to specific packages and issues. I can't even get a result on a a topic with a title I know exists.

Something has to be done. Other site admins must have had this problem before and managed to solve it.

Even if you locked the entire phpBB site, and moved to something else with a better search, it would be better than continuing with the stop words.

cubancigar11 · Post by **cubancigar11** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 8:05 pm

May be we should use some other forum. I know really a LOT of online forums have ditched phpBB because it sucks.

hunky · Post by **hunky** » Mon Nov 24, 2008 7:20 pm

something needs to be done - the forum is getting pretty worthless with lousy search. The community support is one of gentoo's selling points - and if you can't access it...

I haven't read this particular forum yet so maybe there's some tricks to searching but reading through a few of the posts here it seems my assessment is widely confirmed.

In another thread here I finally found out why the only search function that worked for me: "site:forums.gentoo.org" on google has stopped being worth anything. I had no idea someone ended that relationship. I've actually started searching for other distros to move from gentoo because I cannot find anything on the forums anymore. (I'll admit I'm not the best at search syntax on this forum platform - but I suspect that may be the rule rather than the exception). (Haven't landed on another distro that would yet make me migrate yet but I am looking..)

apologies if I covered exact points of others since I haven't read through this entire thread - but at least you can add my vote to do something.

Otherwise, I do appreciate the unpaid volunteers' work. I'm a sysadmin (very small company - less than 60 employees) and know the nature of thankless jobs.

cheers, JD

juantxorena · Post by **juantxorena** » Sun Jan 18, 2009 12:39 pm

I know that things need to be tested and done well, but 5 years is a lot of time. For some reason the google index of these forums has been reseted. Even worse, it seems that there is a 189 hits cap in the search results, so we can only have 4 pages of searches. Now, the search function and the gentoo forums as a whole are useless. Right now I was doing a latex-beamer presentation for tomorrow, and I was trying to search how to install 3rd party latex packages. As you can imagine, I haven't found anything, since the only word remaining in the searches that I've tried is "latex".

Please, when the gentoo forums become usable again, announce it on the gentoo front page.

bunder · Post by **bunder** » Sun Jan 18, 2009 2:16 pm

juantxorena wrote:For some reason the google index of these forums has been reseted.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-33345.html
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-711943.html

cheers

juantxorena · Post by **juantxorena** » Sun Jan 18, 2009 2:48 pm

bunder wrote: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-33345.html
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-711943.html

Thanks for the info. Despite being on the first page, I suppose that I haven't found those post because I was trying to search for them, and having "forums" and "gentoo" in the banned word list didn't help. They don't say anything about the 189 findings cap, at least I have been unable to find anything (using the search function, so that doesn't mean anything).

The result is that the forums are useless, and every change made just increases its uselessness, and that creating a bug in Gentoo Infrastructure or Gentoo Website, or mailing to some list isn't going to change anything (that's what I think after reading those links).

I could start a rant here insulting admins, mods and anybody else, but nobody would read it because nobody would be able to find it anyway. That's why I rather save the effort.

madisonicus · Post by **madisonicus** » Mon Jan 19, 2009 6:00 pm

bunder wrote:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-33345.html
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-711943.html

It would be difficult to underestimate my frustration with this state of affairs. With almost 500 words on the blocked list, I'm contstantly accidentally including one of them. When combined with blocked search engines and a minimally-functional native search capability, there is very little if any way to find information contained in these forums now, effectively eliminating their utility.

What is the current status of this now four-year-old problem? What can we as the community do to help the moderators and admins balance the need of community members to find information within these forums with the need to reasonably limit bandwidth usage? I'd be more than happy to help lend my meager skills to working toward a solution.

-m

bunder · Post by **bunder** » Mon Jan 19, 2009 6:41 pm

madisonicus wrote:It would be difficult to underestimate my frustration with this state of affairs.

i know. me too.

madisonicus wrote:What is the current status of this now four-year-old problem? What can we as the community do to help the moderators and admins balance the need of community members to find information within these forums with the need to reasonably limit bandwidth usage? I'd be more than happy to help lend my meager skills to working toward a solution.

-m

zero. wait for phpbb3, if/when the current fgo team gets their act together and upgrade the forums. it sucks, but there's not much users, or myself can do about it.

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Sun May 17, 2009 6:12 am

Split off "[topic=764696]The forums and Google. Episode II[/topic]".

sigra · Post by **sigra** » Sun Jul 30, 2023 9:28 pm

I read this thread eager to see if someone would post the obvious solution. And finally someone did:

DaysSinceTheDoor wrote:when it gets back the search for the terms not on the black list it searches through the search results for the dropped words and moves those to the top.

I would replace "moves those to the top" with "discards the rest".

I understand that storing and updating a list of the IDs of all posts containing the word "error" (or a similarly common word) takes too much resources. So having 2 categories of words seems like a good idea.

The unusual words are indexed, which means that for each unusual word, the database stores and updates a list of the IDs of the posts that contains the word. So each search must contain an unusual word (such as "okular").

A search in the database for "okular compile error" would return all posts containing "okular". But the next stage must be do discard each post that does not include "compile" and "error".

In the search input field, this could be visualized by making the common words gray ("okular compile error").

It would even be possible to handle quoted multiword strings by discarding posts that don't include the quoted string.