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Platform Update

Lutiana

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Hello everyone,

Just a quick update on the process for determining where we want to go with these forums platform wise.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who voted on the poll, it was very helpful and was a big part of our discussions around what we want to do. For now we have not decided if we are going to move away from vBulletin or not, but we have decided to pilot both Discourse and XenForo.

There are pros and cons to both platforms and we feel that their feature sets are similar enough that they are worth digging deeper into them and giving them a try. So at some point in the coming months we will be announcing an open beta on both platforms and will be opening them up to the community to jump into and really give them a test drive, try to break them and just see how they work for us. So stay tuned for more info on that.

After the two platforms have been thoroughly vetted, we put up another poll to see if the people have changed their minds after trying them out, and only then will the decision to move or not be made.
 
I am looking forward to the open betas on the new platforms. I personally don't like the direction vBulletin is heading in (I get it's not the forum's fault though) and recently I've had better luck with forums based on other software.
 
So, working with a couple of other XenForo sites, I find their search to be inadequate.

Turns out XenForo offers an advanced search add on that requires an external service (ElasticSearch). So, not only do they charge for better search, it complicates the install (ElasticSearch isn't necessarily difficult, but it is "one more thing" to have to maintain and install and for all those familiar and fluent in PHP, ElasticSearch is NOT PHP).

Another forum I use has just switched, and it's been quite nice, but the search is just terrible. I can't find all of my posts, and it doesn't support word stemming (so if you search for "computer" and "computers" you get 2 different results, since they're different words). I've searched for legacy posts that I "know" are there, and can not find them on these sites.

Having a history of posts is not very useful without a competent search function.

So, I wanted to just add that in to the discussion.
 
Is this the basic XenForo search? It works fine for me. Not as many options as vBulletin's search, but vB searches are always flooded with false positives.

xenforosearch.png
 
The issue isn't the options available, it's the results.

Simply, on this other forum, I have examples of posts that I can not find using search. On another forum which is in the processing of moving over, on their beta site, when I search for my name, I get 2 pages of results. I'm much more prolific than that.

But, notably, the lack of stemming is a real issue. I assume today that basic level of functionality. "computer" and "computers", honestly, should return the same results.

My fear, the pain from my tight fitting tin hat, is that the basic search is "sub par", that it is compromised because they have it as a value add. There's nothing more neglected than a feature that you're also charging for.

I've brought it to the admin attention on the other two forums, to see if there was something that slipped through during the conversion. But if this forum is considering this, then I feel they may want to pay some extra attention to this facility during their evaluation.
 
The * wildcard works in XenForo searches. If you search for comput* it will match computer, computers, computing, etc.
 
So, working with a couple of other XenForo sites, I find their search to be inadequate.

Turns out XenForo offers an advanced search add on that requires an external service (ElasticSearch). So, not only do they charge for better search, it complicates the install (ElasticSearch isn't necessarily difficult, but it is "one more thing" to have to maintain and install and for all those familiar and fluent in PHP, ElasticSearch is NOT PHP).

Another forum I use has just switched, and it's been quite nice, but the search is just terrible. I can't find all of my posts, and it doesn't support word stemming (so if you search for "computer" and "computers" you get 2 different results, since they're different words). I've searched for legacy posts that I "know" are there, and can not find them on these sites.

Having a history of posts is not very useful without a competent search function.

So, I wanted to just add that in to the discussion.

I've worked with ElasticSearch in one of my former jobs. I never really liked it and found it not user friendly. But I was on the configuration side. Maybe in actual use it's not as bad? This was many years ago so things probably have changed.
 
The * wildcard works in XenForo searches. If you search for comput* it will match computer, computers, computing, etc.

He specifically stated he was searching for two similar words based on the same root. Don't think he was using "compute*". But I may be wrong. I am assuming he used "computer, computers"? This may be due to ElasticSearch working weirdly.
 
He specifically stated he was searching for two similar words based on the same root. Don't think he was using "compute*". But I may be wrong. I am assuming he used "computer, computers"? This may be due to ElasticSearch working weirdly.

I'm assuming they're not using the ES option. I just assume stemming "comes for free" nowadays. I shouldn't have to wildcard my searches. And, boy, I sure would hope it DOESN'T support "*compute*", which is an absolutely awful search (unless it's actually designed for that, which I doubt).

MySQL does support full text search, but it seems to only support stop words, rather than stemming. It supports wildcards, but only in a certain search mode, which is perhaps what they're using, but then you lose relevancy in your result set. Obviously, I don't know what kind of searching they're doing.

Just, kind of a mess all around. If I have to use wildcards, then so be it. But there's no mention of that in the search dialogs (which consigns the secret to folklore).
 
As this seems to have evolved into the website feedback thread

Does anyone know why, in Blogs when you change the filter to 'all time' you get nothing. Last month, last week and today all filter correctly, but 'All time' displays nothing. The blogs exist, but they keep being hard to find.
 
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