XF 1.5 Alternatives for built in search that DON'T require changing my hosting?

Holly Lisle

Holly Lisle

Member
My host does not offer dedicated VPN server hosting. I like my host (read "I am a fanatical flag-waving fan-girl for my host -- best host ever -- who I've been with since the early 2000s), and my users and I are stuck with the very bad built-in Xenforo search, and unable to upgrade to the very good search you're using with this forum. Why? Because having found Tigertech, I'd rather change forum software than change hosts.

Which puts me in a really bad spot, because second only to my host, I love your forum software.

The included basic search engine sucks, though.

I will not change hosts to get better search, and I don't want to change forum software, because (second only to a beautiful threaded forum software I used in the late nineties and early 2000s, which was abandoned by its developers) this is the best forum software I can find. And after using it for about four years now, my folks love it, too.

Which leaves me looking at third-party options. Does anyone know of a third party forum search engine that does not expose users to privacy invasion (Google, et. al.) that could be made compatible with this software and integrated into it?
 
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You could setup Elastic Search on a VPS with a different host, make it require a TLS client certificate and modify XenForo Enhanced Search to provide that certificate.

This would allow you to keep hosting and forum software and use elastic search (albeit most likely a bit slower than if it was local).

Though, honestly, I'd just change the host - no matter how good the current one is ;)
 
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StarArmy said:
Threadloom?

What's the issue with the normal search, by the way?
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My folks are fiction writers, and talk shop. Pretty much ONLY shop. So a search engine that responds to most searches with "The following words were not included in your search because they are too short, too long, or too common:" when the too-common words are the core words in most discussions, is a problem.

And as my membership is growing and folks are getting more active on the boards, the problem is getting worse.
 
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Kirby said:
You could setup Elastic Search on a VPS with a different host, make it require a TLS client certificate and modify XenForo Enhanced Search to provide that certificate.

This would allow you to keep hosting and forum software and use elastic search (albeit most likely a bit slower than if it was local).
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I'll run this past my developer and see if it's something we can do. Thank you.
Though, honestly, I'd just change the host - no matter how good the current one is ;)
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If your livelihood depended on site uptime and fast, personal customer service from a small, dedicated team of folks who know you by name and have worked with you for years, (none of whom have quit, all of whom answer the phone when you have something bad go wrong) who are also both capable and willing to go into your code to see if they can spot problems from their end that my developer and I can't see from ours...?

No. You wouldn't. I ran through half a dozen hosts, including highly recommended big name hosts, before I got to them. I know what other hosts look like, and I know how they operate. If you have a just-for-fun forum, you can go anywhere. If you're supporting the paying students of twenty-plus writing classes and you've found solid ground, you don't fling yourself back into the ocean to swim with the sharks.
 
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