Wildcat Media
Well-known member
While trying to set up some search forums, I realized that the search terms entered for the title are taken literally:
We have several cases where we want to feature discussions on a popular person who might belong to a group, yet we can only use one search term here.
For example, if someone has a unique first name, a forum member might only use that person's first name in the thread title. Others might use the surname. Still others might refer to the name of a group the person belongs to.
The problem with using prefixes is that we only allow staff to assign prefixes; therefore, having a moderator continuously monitor threads for new posts and add prefixes is a necessity, and that also does not include 20-25 years of existing posts. Similarly, given past abuses, we do not allow users to use tags. And even if we did, so few would use them that, again, we'd have to resort manual editing to add those tags. The Search Forum solves this by doing a search on the thread title and updates the contents of that node each time the cron runs.
My suggestion is to change this so that we can use operators or at the very least, multiple search terms. Using OR, AND, and "quotes" to specify what we want is helpful, with OR being the default. To use an example, we might use search terms like:
We have several cases where we want to feature discussions on a popular person who might belong to a group, yet we can only use one search term here.
For example, if someone has a unique first name, a forum member might only use that person's first name in the thread title. Others might use the surname. Still others might refer to the name of a group the person belongs to.
The problem with using prefixes is that we only allow staff to assign prefixes; therefore, having a moderator continuously monitor threads for new posts and add prefixes is a necessity, and that also does not include 20-25 years of existing posts. Similarly, given past abuses, we do not allow users to use tags. And even if we did, so few would use them that, again, we'd have to resort manual editing to add those tags. The Search Forum solves this by doing a search on the thread title and updates the contents of that node each time the cron runs.
My suggestion is to change this so that we can use operators or at the very least, multiple search terms. Using OR, AND, and "quotes" to specify what we want is helpful, with OR being the default. To use an example, we might use search terms like:
john OR smith OR "john smith" OR "smith college" to get the results we need.
Upvote
3
Yeah, I wasn't too good about explaining it...
