Community Relations Archive

In light of the recent update to the Lithium forum software, I thought I'd revisit the suggestions for Advanced Search features that I've been requesting for nearly two years now.

Here's the current status of Advanced Search features:

1. Unless the option of "anytime (unsorted)" is selected for "Return only messages posted", no results at all are returned on any search.

(Comment: This may be because messages are in the process of being indexed. I'll check again in 24 hours.)

2. There is now a limited option for selecting the date range of posted messages.

(Comment: This addresses in part one of the requests I originally made -- to have the ability to select the dates of messages to be returned. That's a Good Thing, and it's appreciated. It does seem to be an unnecessarily limited feature; it's simply assumed that the "end date" is always "today," rather than allowing users to pick both a start date and end date for messages. Was this limitation of options necessary?)

3. The ability to return all messages that satisfy a keyword search, and to have those results sorted by date, has been removed. You can now either get only a subset of results (the most recent 180 days, or approximately half a year), or all results but not sorted by date.

(Comment: I expect the reason behind this was to reduce either the volume of results being returned by the database for each query, or the additional processing on the database server imposed by using the SQL "order by" clause. I appreciate that the belief behind this decision was to respond to user complaints about the "your request is being processed" and "too many searches" messages. Another alternative would be to buy and operate a faster database server, but this would increase operational costs. Unfortunately, that might still have been the better solution. Eliminating a popular feature because people complained about its performance is a little bit like a doctor cutting off your hand because you broke a fingernail. "Well, but your fingernail doesn't hurt any more, does it?" Better would have been to solve the performance problems instead of crippling functionality that, when it worked, worked just fine.)

4. The maximum number of messages that can be returned in one request has been reduced from 100 to 50.

(Comment: See above comment about addressing performance problems by revoking useful features.)

5. Rather than separate searches for text in the body of messages and text in the subject line of messages, search text is now provided in one text field with a flag to indicate that a search is to be of both the message body and subject line, or of the subject line only.

(Comment: This change actually adds some functionality to the Advanced Search system, making it more useful. Thanks!)

7. The requested ability to search for multiple-word phrases within messages has still not been implemented.

(Comment: This is the one feature that we still need more than any other. By allowing us to more enter more specific search terms, you could cut down on the number of results the database server would have to return, and we would be able to identify messages of interest in fewer search passes.)

6. The requested ability to indicate that only unread messages are to be returned has still not been implemented.

(Comment: This is a nice-to-have... but it really would be nice to have! And like the multi-word search capability described above, it would also be another way to cut down on the number of search results that have to be returned and passed to each user.)

8. Based on the one type of search that can currently be done (all, unsorted), the requested fix to the incorrect calculation of relevance scores of returned messages seems to have been implemented.

(Comment: Thank you! If this relevance scorecalculation is working properly -- and indications look good -- it will be a big help in finding specific messages. That's a win for everyone.)

9.Search results now display ashort section of the message body of each message that contains matching text.

(Comment: This is a very helpful new feature. Well done!)

10.Search results nowprintmatching text in italics.

(Comment: Anotherthoughtful new feature.)

The progress that has been made on enhancements to the search facility is appreciated. If some near-term attention can be given to the remaining issues listed here, that would be greatly appreciated as well.

Thanks!

--Flatfingers