Ditto.

More generally search is hampering maintenance of the Hilton Family Hotel Master Thread, and I suspect also Canarsie's ongoing efforts to rationalise threads in the Hilton forum.

To clarify, I'm posting here as a general member. I have some FAQs (the Hilton hotels thread is just one example) and updating these is difficult at the moment, thus quality of information is suffering.

As I've said before, for the general FTer, it's just an inconvenience and at worst it will cause someone to post a new thread or not post an answer (like my problem yesterday) because it doesn't show up in a search of that users posts. For the MODs, it's a problem that can prevent them from doing their jobs.

For a while communications were pretty good, and I posted that in the ORF, where I had previously posted that the lack of communications on IB's part was the major problem on the search issue. Maybe it's time for the MODs and/or TalkBoard to start griping about the search problems and the lack of communication/cooperation from IB on these issues.

I tried bringing that up to TB, but the response wasn't too positive:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=787503

Yes, the search index has been "stuck" (yet again ) as of 27 Feb 2008, 13:xx EST. Search results do not include anything posted after the said date/time.

To test search index, you can use the following link and select [Sort by Post Date]:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/searc...+Now&query=you

That pretty much agrees with the time frame I was seeing in my searches.

I wish someone would get to work on the indexing problem. It will probably slow everything down, but this is getting ridiculous.

02/27/2008 04:41:39 (CST). According to the beta search, that's the last post I made. I actually have a couple of more since then but none was showing up.

Being non-techie, I really don't understand how a search improvement would cause so many "unexpected" issues.

Yes, it's true our traditional, classic search can't do 3-letter search. It had worked quite well for me, with a little boost from Google sometimes. I liked the format. It generally gave me a good enough hit from the search result. I even got to see posts from just minutes ago.

As for the beta IB search, yes, that's nice now I can do 3-letter search, which I don't do that often anyway. Yes, it will even show me posts from ages ago (2-3 or even 4-year), which I couldn't in the classic search but I hardly had to dig up threads from that age.

Meanwhile, I also get to see the phantom pages/posts that were deleted and (supposedly) invisible from the general members. Even with an added data server, the search index will be unannouncedly out of sync, so we don't get to see those recently-made posts. The format/layout doesn't tell me straightforwardly if new posts are made to the threads I am following. We need to do the workaround-subscription-folder trick in order to get the result we can really enjoy.

Most of all, the general FT public don't get advanced notice at all, as far as the IB technology improvement goes. If enough folks complained, we may get a response from Kevin. It had happened at least three times this year that FT was unbearably slow, just out of the blue. We didn't know if that's a scheduled maintenance issue or what.

It seems to me there was never a schedule to perform whatever fixes, big or small, IB needed to do.

As far as the technology goes, IB is not effectively communicating to FTers. Most of the times, I feel ignored when reporting technical issues. Maybe the issues I ran into were not significantly enough.

However, if the problems we are reporting seem to be ongoing, don't we at least get some say monthly progress updates? Is this too much to ask?

For what it's worth, "search" isn't picking up recent posts when I use it either.

A suggestion: When the page comes up saying perhaps there could be a link added through which the feedback report can be made?

Id be interested to know if FT has seen a drop in traffic since the new search began. I certainly have cut my time on FT by 75-80% since I cant easily search for threads like before and I seem to not have replies to threads older than 2-3 days (whereas in the past I would scroll down and find posts to threads as old as 2-3 weeks, a complete indication that the new search is not performing its job for others as well). This is very sad, and FT has yet to switch back to the old version. I wonder how many people will switch to other message boards for posting related airline topics. Ive noticed a lot more FFP related posts on airliners.net lately...is that going to steal FTers away?! Hope not, but who knows.

You suspect correctly.

The subscribed threads workaround I described below might help:

This doesn't depend on the indexing being up to date, but works in real-time like the forum index does.

Yes, and thanks ed1. It was helpful, but still many discussions I post in do not stay active as long as in the past. It used to be I would see active discussions in old posts quite frequently, but now once they seem buried by multiple pages it is becoming less likely that they are being read. Im just saying that the search function seems to be limiting ongoing discussion mostly to issues at the top of each forum; but perhaps my situation is unusual. Although this only started once the new search came about.

I agree that without the search indexing for several days, the My Threads, My Posts, and searching for topics to avoid posting an unnecessary new thread instead of finding and existing one have become a major issue, especially for the more experienced users. Continuing discourse also suffers when the threads drop off from the first couple pages of a forum index.

After reading a newspaper article on Mohammed Fikry, who was taken off an American Airlines flight last year, I searched for "Fikry" (without quotes) on the AAdvantage page, and also under "Advanced Search" Search Titles. Neither found any postings with "Fikry" in it ("Nothing found to match your search request").

Lo and behold, at the bottom of the first AAdvantage page, there was a 3-hour-old thread with "Fikry". What gives?!

Indexing of posts (necessary for the search to find posts) hasn't been working since Tuesday, so all posts since it stopped can't be found by searching.

I'd like to thank everyone who has posted in this thread for providing feedback and for championing improvements. The frustration is certainly understandable and you can be sure no one on this end takes any offense. In fact, I'm sure we all agree we're lucky to have a membership as passionate as you are. There are A LOT of online communities who don't see as many posts in a month on their entire forum as we see in a week in just one thread ... and to think, all we have to do to drive traffic is screw things up

I'm afraid I don't have any updates for you other than to tell you we've weeded through this thread and have compiled a list outlining every issue that has been raised.

Top of the list, of course, will be solving the index problem.