Community Relations Archive
Thread: Why is the forum search almost ALWAYS disabled?
Usually I just refresh a dozen or so times and the search finally works.
Klinsek wrote:
Makes it nearly impossible to use these forums without a search function.
It usually means too many people are using the search at that time. Due to performance issues or what-not. Keep trying and it'll work. What really makes me mad is when I search and hit the 'next page' button and then it gives me the search is unavailable message! Grrrrr
That's why I always put as many search results on one page now! 
Blimigerite wrote:
What really makes me mad is when I search and hit the 'next page' button and then it gives me the search is unavailable message! Grrrrr
DeQuosaek wrote:
Tiggs wrote:
Lithium is checking into this issue.
While they are at it you might mention that I have to log in many times every day because it does not save the login information like I ask it to. The timeout for it seems to be maybe a half hour tops. I'd like it to save the information so I don't have to log in again ever unless I go to another computer. Occasionally this will work, but it seems anytime there is a major change to the game or the forums this feature ends up broken.
Also, occasionally when replying to someone it will tell you that it is deleting HTML code that is not allowed even though you haven't done anything other than hit reply and quote the other person and hit reply. I am using the latest version of IE with all of the latest updates btw.
*edit* here is the message: Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied.Message Edited by DeQuosaek on 06-08-2005 12:31 AM
Totally agree, it's a pain that we have to login each time because the forum forgets our saved logins again.
They fixed it once, but broke it again.
The Forum search disables when busy I think. Again, very annoying.
DeQuosaek wrote:
Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied.
DeQuosaek, I agree that this is an irritating thing, but that's all it is. At least you can just hit the "Post" button again and your message gets posted. (Incidentally, I got iton my first attempt toreply to your message.
) (Note:this problem occurswhen I remove the space [rendered as an open and close paragraph tag]between the last word of a quoted block of text and the horizontal rule tagthat follows it. Apparently the DIV tags that are being inserted aren't being placed properly around thisgenerated HTML-- Lithium, please take note.)
There's a worse (but related) problem: getting the message that says you're using the invalid "style" attribute. With this one, you actually have to go into the HTML editor, search for occurrences of that attribute (and its associated junk), remove them, and try to resubmit your message. And if you missed one, you get to do it again.
And if you're lucky, the editor didn't blank out your message entirely.
And the worst part of it is, the "style" attribute (and, again, its associated "dir = ltr" and other junk) isn't something we users arewriting-- it's inserted automatically by the Lithium editor! Why in the world isthis editorinsertingHTML attributes thatit won't accept?
The good news is that I haven't seen this particular message lately. With any luck, this particular bug has been squashed.
Without luck... sigh.
(Additional note: I thought the reduction of search abilities was supposed to solve the "search disabled" problem.Given that we'restill seeing this problem, I'm concerned thatwe're going to have to accept further limitations on searching. Double-plus ungood, that would be.)
--Flatfingers
Copy the following link into your browser's address bar, then edit the bits where it says "password=password" and "memberName=loginname"
https://login.station.sony.com/login/station/login_popup.jsp?password=password&memberName=loginname
Now hit enter to go there, this will take you to a blank page, add this page to your favourites/bookmarks. Now before you visit the forums for the first time in a session, or whenever you get logged out, or whenever you get one of those "Operation timed out" errors when the forum inexplicably redirects you to lithiumgw.station.sony.com pages (that error always log you out of the forums), just click that link, then once you see the blank page go back to wherever you were in the forums and you should be fully logged in.
Big warning: Doing this will save your SWG account login details in an easily accessible place on your computer, so don't do this on any shared computers, or any computer that anyone else has access to.
PS Google site search for teh win! I've used this to search the SWG forums for a long time, its just so much more reliable, and definitely an awful lot faster! In fact I've even got Google's site search of swg forums set up as a quick search shortcut in Firefox.
Tiggs wrote:
Lithium is checking into this issue.
Any chance you could make sure they know that the graphical editor has something wrong with it causing it to only work in MSIE and not firefox?
I don't understand why SOE doesn't develop something in house based on the several amazing and stable open source codes out there. I won't name any of them here, but a little research on the issue would turn over good results.
With an open source, the doors would open to endless options on how to better integrate the forum with the game bringing the community closer together. Given a knowledgeable admin is at the helm. The forum here is the community gateway for the game, and having an unstable one is hurting everyone.
I own and admin a huge forum and trialed Lithium a while back before going with an open source. It was a brief trial.
Happy to give my insight via PM's if any dev/admin wants to chat about it in detail.
Just copy the following into google when the forum search goes down.
site:forums.station.sony.com/swg searchword
IE:
site:forums.station.sony.com/swg rebel helm
Will search the only the swgforums for rebel helm info