The big reason we want to keep this archive here is that it's MASSIVE. There is a ton of content in this forum, and a lot of it is pretty good. There is terrifying google juice here.
I wish more people had the moral imperative to preserve information that we do. For someone who's been here a decade or more, imagine a decade from now reading an old thread from past you?
I've realized this forum is massive the same time I discovered something else. Whoever provides your search is just awful. Me of a few months ago said "Hmm need new shoes, wonder if someone already did the research for me" I then searched at the top for shoes, 40 seconds of loady wheel later, I gave up and just did the research myself.
This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.
The big reason we want to keep this archive here is that it's MASSIVE. There is a ton of content in this forum, and a lot of it is pretty good. There is terrifying google juice here.
I wish more people had the moral imperative to preserve information that we do. For someone who's been here a decade or more, imagine a decade from now reading an old thread from past you?
God I looked back at some of my facebook posts from two years a go. What a bellend I was.
Hey man, I listened to Glenn Beck's radio show every day at lunch in 2004. Shit happens.
It's still weird to think of this forum as a place I have been posting on for years. I showed up here in 2010, after having sat down at some point in 2009 to map out my life a bit upon turning 25. There were all sorts of things on this list I made, but I remember a few of them that in retrospect, make me laugh about the inevitability of my existence here: - Start listening to podcasts - Start going to PAXes - Get more heavily into German board games - Create online content and participate more in forums
I've realized this forum is massive the same time I discovered something else. Whoever provides your search is just awful. Me of a few months ago said "Hmm need new shoes, wonder if someone already did the research for me" I then searched at the top for shoes, 40 seconds of loady wheel later, I gave up and just did the research myself.
This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.
The search used to work perfectly. It became unusable when Scott downgraded the forum from Vanilla 1 to 2.
I've realized this forum is massive the same time I discovered something else. Whoever provides your search is just awful. Me of a few months ago said "Hmm need new shoes, wonder if someone already did the research for me" I then searched at the top for shoes, 40 seconds of loady wheel later, I gave up and just did the research myself.
This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.
The search used to work perfectly. It became unusable when Scott downgraded the forum from Vanilla 1 to 2.
The search was still bad, in fact it seems to be more or less the same from when I used it. If something uses Elasticsearch as its backend just use that. Lucene works much better than most every other search engine I've seen besides Google.
If Vanilla uses Elasticsearch and I just don't know it then they obviously set up their fields to be fucking garbage.
I can not get any of these new forums even running. I even tried Discourse, which I don't like very much, and it won't run. I just follow their tutorials and they don't start. All this shit is garbage. I think Automattic, the people who make Wordpress, are the only people who know how to make web applications that other people can self host successfully. Why don't they make a forum?
I've found that the odds of ANY tutorial for ANY web software being accurate began with a 50% chance in 2002 and has dropped at a steady rate ever since.
I think Automattic, the people who make Wordpress, are the only people who know how to make web applications that other people can self host successfully. Why don't they make a forum?
Regardless of their back-end, they made a terrible UX mistake.
Forums should by default search by thread title. That is the primary type of search a user will want to conduct. Everything else is an edge case.
This is GENERALLY true, but I believe a secondary emphasis on searching through text of forum threads should be emphasized when searching through textual forum data.
I got flarum to run. It's actually quite nice, but it's too light on the features. It doesn't even have the ability to manually approve new users. Hell, there isn't even a screen (that I could find) that lists the registered users.
Comments
I wish more people had the moral imperative to preserve information that we do. For someone who's been here a decade or more, imagine a decade from now reading an old thread from past you?
Past me was an asshole.
Current me is also an asshole, but in a different way.
Future me, I predict, will find new and exciting ways to be an asshole.
This is my way of saying I hope archives are indexed.
Edit; should add, still a bellend now.
Like, 12 year old me.
I got better.
It's still weird to think of this forum as a place I have been posting on for years. I showed up here in 2010, after having sat down at some point in 2009 to map out my life a bit upon turning 25. There were all sorts of things on this list I made, but I remember a few of them that in retrospect, make me laugh about the inevitability of my existence here:
- Start listening to podcasts
- Start going to PAXes
- Get more heavily into German board games
- Create online content and participate more in forums
If Vanilla uses Elasticsearch and I just don't know it then they obviously set up their fields to be fucking garbage.
Go ahead. Type "metal" into the search now.
Forums should by default search by thread title. That is the primary type of search a user will want to conduct. Everything else is an edge case.