We would love to know a little more specifically what exactly you and others don't like about the search. It would help improve things better than just knowing someone 'hates' the search.
I would like to summarize different issues relating to the search and other features mentioned above by members...
As for specific actions you want to perform:
To keep track of threads you posted in: Thread Subscription is most useful for that. Whenever you post to a thread it is added to your subscribed threads list. If you don't care about tracking a thread anymore, you can "unsubscribe" from it.
If it doesn't work for you, you probably turned it off. To turn it on, go to your "User CP" and under "Edit options", in the "Default Thread Subscription Mode", select something other than "Do not subscribe"
Finding all posts of a user: A link to this is found when you click the name of a poster on the left side of a post they make. A link to this from the profile can be added as well (by the admin).
Finding all threads started by a member: can be found in the profile, or can be searched in the search page - open the advanced panel and type in the exact name of the member.
Searching all threads started by a member: can be searched in the search page - type in a search string and open the advanced panel and type in he exact name of the member.
Searching (as opposed to 'finding') all posts of a member: This is currently not possible.
Here are some aspects of the new search and are compared with the old search.
We will begin with some shortcomings of the new search and compare them to the old search:
Search in replies: At the moment this is not possible with BT search. BT search supplies Thread search rather only. Reply search is something that will be added in future versions.
Search by user: As indicated above, at the moment, user search is based on threads started, not including replies.
While it was possible to some extent doing the above two functions, searching in the old system created a load with "side effects" in the form of the slow or unresponsive board you all experienced (see below explanation about the server load issues). This sometimes made searches not too useful. Combined with the lower relevancy search of the old system, which caused you to sometimes not find specific threads you were looking for, search in the old search system was limited to some extent.
As for other aspects of advanced search, some of which were not possible in the old search system:
Search by date/relevancy: BT search supports these features. In fact, relevancy in BT is far more accurate than the old internal search.
Search by title: Given the higher relevancy of BT search, you don't need to specify "search in title" anymore. Threads with matching words in the title will be showing higher on the list when you search by relevancy. This simplifies finding the relevant threads.
Multiple searches & Modify your search: In the old search you had to wait 60 seconds before trying another search. If you search for something and didn't find your results in the first time, and wanted to update the search term to try to get better results, you would have to go back to the search page (which lost you the search term you used), type in a new search term and wait a minute before trying again. With the new search you can simply update the search result that is already showing on the results page and try a second search right away.
Faster search: Not only did you have to wait 60 seconds between searches, but searches were also very slow at times. It also created a server load when several people searched at the same time, which caused not only the search to be slow but also the other aspects of the board. The new search is faster (granted that it does not supply you with replies search at the moment), and does not affect the board's performence. The board is fast and responsive even if many other users search the board.
Search in related forums: You can now select a specific forum to search on, but also tell the system to search in all related forums. This is an advanced feature which didn't exist in the old search. The related forums search includes in the search all other forums that are in the same category. If your selected forum is in "sports", all other forums in "sports" will be searched in as well.
Stemming: When you search for a word, like cruise for example, BT search returns results for: cruises, cruising, cruised etc... This is something that didn't exist in the old search. This greatly helps in finding desired results when you don't remember exactly which form of the word was used or when you are looking for cruise related.
Why is DisBoards making these changes?
Text based search in the old system was very inefficient. There is no existing way to solve this internally and services like BoardTracker supply a solution for that need.
The effect of the inefficiency of the old search was in creating a load on the CPUs of the board, which caused the board to become very slow. Certain aspects of the board were greatly affected, including messages you saw of "too busy", limiting intervals between page views (search, new posts and others) slow response time for viewing and replying to threads and others.
This also limited the activity and growth of the board.
How is this load created?
When you use the old search, the database which performs the search becomes extremely loaded (meaning, the CPU is very busy). Once that happens, the database can not effectively handle other operations. This causes long waits on the web servers when fetching data or storing data into the database servers (such as reading or posting). This load is not something that is related to bandwidth or other aspects that can be addressed. This is a design issue that can not really be addressed internally.
Suggestions to switch search off during peak times will not really help.
For one, people will wait for search to come back on, and that will hurt the system even more, since once it is back on, everyone will try searching at the same time. This will only shift the peak time.
The second problem is that if you can not search, your user satisfaction will greatly decrease. See how much some are annoyed that they can't search exactly how they used to.. now think how unsatisfied they/you will be when you can't search at all.
With BT search, you can search whenever you want. Even if not exactly as you used to, and indeed changes require some adjusting, you can always search now, the board is faster and for most uses, the existing search is very useful. We would be happy to see examples where it is not, so we can better the search.
Note though that full-text search mechanism is not the right way to do non-search operations such as keep track of threads you posted in. For this, as explained above, there are other and better mechanisms.
We are always improving BT search and that is why it is important for us to hear exactly WHY you find it limited or not good enough, and to see examples for such limitations.
