buckeyefanflyer

In the morning I like to see all the posts from the previous night. I go to bed at 9:00PM when I last view FT. After page 20 it asks you the page you want so I put 21 but I still get the last posts from page 20. How far back can I get posts, say you want to see all days posts.

lin821

If there shouldn't be page 21, then you can't get to it. It probably has something wrong with the index, compound with wireless/mobile posts.

See this thread for more discussion:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...messed-up.html

violist

In my experience this happens right at the bottom of a page; the
pagination options change before there's any content to go onto the
last page.

lin821

Due to FT post/thread indexes out of sync. Just look up previous discussion on phantom pages/posts in this forum.

This is a well-documented problem since the, well I am going to by hated by IB folks by I just have to say it, "IB Search" comes alone. The oldest thread reporting index problem I think is Search Problems.

Having said that, the causes of the problem are multifaceted. FTers have been told the following possibilites: servers down, index falling behind, glitches, deleted or masked posts,...etc, plus something unexplainable (yes, no joking. This one takes the cake ).

Whatever cause it is (this time seems to be related to the mobile/wireless posts), as far as I know, IB hasn't nailed down the ultimate fix for this never-really-goes-away problem. They tried. There are times IB just can't duplicate the problem FTers are experiencing over and over again.

Sad? Yes. Very.

IB-Dick

lin821 - This problem isn't multifaced. It has a very simple explaination.

Search is a very processor intensive process, so one thing we do to minimize that is limit the number of results to 500. 25 resilts per page, times 20 pages = 500 results.

We will look at geting rid of the ability to try to go to a 21's page, but the reason why you don't get anything for the 21's page is because there isn't a 21st page.

We have discussed opening up this 500 result limit before, and we've done a lot of investigating on the topic. The reality is that for the thousands of searches that are done on flyertalk a day, only maybe a dozen click on to page two. (let alone page 20). This means that the first 25 results a usually enough, and if we change that to 1000 results, it would have a negative effect on performance, even when 99% of people aren't going to look past the first 25.

lin821

Yes, we did discuss the the 500-post cap on search results before. That may well be the simple answer to the OP's confusion hence my first short reply indicating no page 21 to be seen. I have no objection to the 500-post cap, in case I wasn't clear.

However, what violist had described, if I understand him correctly, is different from OP. I assume he's talking about non-existing page when reading a thread. That has nothing to do with search but more to do with out-of-sync indexes. That's what causes the "phantom page syndrome" and we had touched on this issue in the master Search Problems thread & thru my PMs with Mikel as well.

My lengthy 2nd post was meant for violist's issue. It was my own understanding of this long existing problem that would surface without a consistent pattern. Unless there's tech note/post I failed to read, I personally haven't seen any update on finding a permanent fix.

I am not saying you IB teck people haven't been working in the backroom. It's just most of the time, FTers are not getting updates from your guys. To say at least, the most recent update from you was dated 5/18/09 in the Search Update thread. As of today, I still don't know if you guys finally have a solution (or not). It's very frustrating for those of us who report problems but never know what's going on.

I personally don't expect you guys to make a post for every improvement or progress. It would have been nice, though, IB can give us a lump sum update about the changes on FT periodically. I don't think that's too much to ask.