New restrictions on searching FlyerTalk
 

Starting today I am restricting searches to logged in members only.

So if you try to search and get a permission denied page log in!

Thanks,
John

John,

Working on Saturday? BAD BOI!!!! :)

Might I suggest this be an announcement sticky? Not sure many people visit this forum.

Thanks

William

I think this is a good idea. Another message board with similar traffic which I visit (same software, same version, I believe) has search turned off completely, even for "contributing" (= paying) members. Since they did that, speed improved considerably. It appears that search really puts a heavy load on the servers, I guess?

No, don't turn off Search completely!!!

It's a very, very, very valuable tool. Makes it much easier to find threads on a specific topic rather than constantly starting new threads on it. Of course, some people do that anyway, but if there were no Search, the repetition would grow worse and the access to great info would be seriously curtailed.

But I do understand that putting some limitations on Search can help performance, and applaud John's efforts in this area. ^

I did not mean to suggest that at all. I was just trying to illustrate that search can apparently put a very high load on the servers.

Second that motion. :D

FWIW - as I often search at sat 4am mountain time, when only a small handful of others are active on FT, and I must say there is never any perceptible difference. Likewise speed of FT for me varies little whether daytime USA or 3 or 4am.

Of course, for those missing out on the searches without logging in, Google does a reasonable job in finding pages on Flyertalk (though not as good as the Flyertalk search engine!).

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...7&page=1&pp=15

Something is wrong with this. I did a search, got about 7 pages of results, clicked on 3 of the pages with no problems, and when I tried to look at the fourth page was denied access.

search is definately not working
 

It's worse than than. :( I just did a search on the word "Do" followed by a search on the word "origin". My intention was to post my results to a thread where a newbie posted (yet again) the query about the origin of the word Do in regards to get-togethers.
Imagine my chagrin when my searches came up with nothing! :(

You can't make two letter searches... that's been a rule from when Flyertalk switched over to the vBulletin software...

aloha

This happens on vBulletin boards a lot. The search is typically associated with an ID - after some set duration (15-20 minutes), the ID expires, and you won't be able to access subsequent pages of results.

Hopefully it's a tweakable function.

that is well and good (well, maybe not ;) ), but that does not explain why the word "origin" also came up with nothing. Especially since I had just read a new thread with that word in the title.

Let me explain:
We switched the board over to allow searches only to those members registered on FlyerTalk. We hope it to be a temporary solution to determining the slowness of FlyerTalk in the last few weeks. Search as you might guess is a real bandwidth hog and with 1-2,000 people on FT at all times, there has been a lot of searching going on. As well, we have not completed to entire indexing of FlyerTalk for searches and that is why some of the terms you might search for are not coming up. We as well, are two small upgrades behind in the software as we hate to take the board down to accomplish this - there just does not seem to be any slow periods any more.

So, in a nutshell, we're likely to soon shut FT down for a few hours or a day so we can 1) add on the three servers currently now powering FT, 2) reindex the complete Web site; and 3) upgade the software because one of the upgrades has a better search index tool.

Very much sorry for the inconvenience but we try and balance this against the complaints we'd get when we do actually have to shut down for maintenance. Going to try and do this all at once.

Sounds good. Small pain (loss of FT for a day) for longtime gain ^

Inconvenience? Randy, you have got to be either kidding or the nicest guy there is.

The search function on the old software was so slow it was painful. The slowest search I've ever done on the new BB is blindingly fast by comparison.

No complaints here; search works great for me!