Searching across multiple forums
Nov 3, 2003 | 2:07 pm
#1
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 431
Searching across multiple forums
Is there any way to search across multiple/all forums? If not, is that a limitation of Infopop or has it been disabled for performance reasons? I've tried removing the ForumChoice parameter from the HTML for the search form, but that didn't work. If this isn't available, would anyone mind if I built a simple script that ran a search on multiple forums?
Also, completely unrelated, but another pet peeve that I have is how the forums have unfriendly numeric names. For instance, the "Suggestions" forum is "Forum73". When I see a URL in a post, it would be nice to know which forum it's taking me to. Just a minor thing to keep in mind if any new bulletin board software is being evaluated. Other niceties to look for would be spell-checking, post preview, thread view count, a topic created (vs. updated) date column, and the killer feature of automatically jumping to the last read post in each thread when it is opened. Just some ideas...
Thanks.
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Author of MileTracker (miletracker.com).
[This message has been edited by jimbob (edited 11-03-2003).]
Also, completely unrelated, but another pet peeve that I have is how the forums have unfriendly numeric names. For instance, the "Suggestions" forum is "Forum73". When I see a URL in a post, it would be nice to know which forum it's taking me to. Just a minor thing to keep in mind if any new bulletin board software is being evaluated. Other niceties to look for would be spell-checking, post preview, thread view count, a topic created (vs. updated) date column, and the killer feature of automatically jumping to the last read post in each thread when it is opened. Just some ideas...
Thanks.
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Author of MileTracker (miletracker.com).
[This message has been edited by jimbob (edited 11-03-2003).]
Nov 3, 2003 | 3:50 pm
#2
Original Poster
Join Date: Mar 2001
Posts: 431
Ah. I just happened to try to check the most recent posts for a particular user from their bio and I noticed that manually setting the ForumChoice to ALL will search across all forums until 300 results are found. It's not fast, but I wouldn't expect or really need for it to be. It's also not very flexible since it may find 300 results in Aer Lingus before reaching a forum that I'm interested in. It seems that setting the date filter reduces the data set significantly and can help make sure that the search gets across all forums for frequently used words.
If you want to experiment with this, save the HTML from the search page and change the form action to GET instead of POST. Setup and run the search that you want and then change the new URL to substitute ForumChoice=ALL for whatever ForumChoice is already there (such as ForumChoice=73). Let me know if you have any questions.
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Author of MileTracker (miletracker.com).
[This message has been edited by jimbob (edited 11-03-2003).]
If you want to experiment with this, save the HTML from the search page and change the form action to GET instead of POST. Setup and run the search that you want and then change the new URL to substitute ForumChoice=ALL for whatever ForumChoice is already there (such as ForumChoice=73). Let me know if you have any questions.
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Author of MileTracker (miletracker.com).
[This message has been edited by jimbob (edited 11-03-2003).]
Nov 4, 2003 | 1:36 pm
#3
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 473
Board wide search has been disabled for performance reasons.