Aside from fixing the problems I put in some more tweaks to make the forum faster and more reliable.
Here's the list of changes that you can see:
- The memberlist is gone - not very useful with over 90000 members, slowed the forum down when used and spammers could easily retrieve email addresses from it - if you need to know about the top posters refer to the statistics page instead.
- Since so many people like the feature in the game I decided to introduce the "modified" tag here as well. Posts that show the "edited by" footnote now also show a "modified" watermark in the upper right corner.
- Posting, editing and deleting messages should now be noticably faster, this is due to a change in the search engine - I'll explain that below.
)The Search Engine: good news - I will now not have to de-activate it if the server load stays like it is at the moment.
The big change first: posts that are created will not be indexed immediately anymore but all posts that have been created/edited/deleted in a day are indexed together at night when the forum is not very busy. This means it can take up to 24 hours until your post can be found with the Search.
I had to face accusations that we would be deleting specific posts from the search tables so they cannot be found (sorry, but this is ridiculous!).
Anyway, I will now explain how our search operates so you can see for yourselves that there is no covering-up being done.
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You may have been wondering why some of your searches don't bring back any results. The answer may not be what you wanted to hear, but here it is: it isn't a bug, it is a feature.
So, this is probably a good time to explain the mysteries of the search function.
There are a number of search terms which occur very frequently and, when someone searches for these search terms it puts a heavy load on the database. For this reason there is an automatic limiter, which kicks in and ignores any search term which occurs more than a certain number of times.
The limiter is currently set to 20000, which automatically excludes the following 3 search terms.
Code: Select all
argon (22608)
xenon (24725)
khaak (31419)Further limitations include a minimum search term length of 4 characters and a maximum of 20. In addition, there is a lengthy list of "stopwords", that is to say words that will not be included in the search because they are too common. If you are really curious, you can have a look at the list here.
Obviously the standard phpBB filters also apply, so BBCode tags, text in quotes, links, HTML tags, and so on will all be ignored. Additionally, a further filter exists which filters out words with 4 or more letters in a row that are the same. So "hmmmmm" and "spaaaaaam" would not be included in the search.
And there's more.
Messages in the Off-Topic forum are not indexed.
Threads whose title consists only of a single word (the favourite is "Help", which of course doesn't say much about what is in the thread) will not be indexed either. Answers in these threads will be indexed, as long as their title doesn't also consist of just a single word.
Numbers won't be included in the search.
A new restriction is that only the first 300 words of a message will be indexed. Really long posts put a heavy load on the search function every time they are posted, edited or deleted.
So, clear as mud?
Of course my job as Site Admin would be boring if there wasn't anything more so there's even more optimisations to bo done to website and forum.
, since I created my own Forum some while back, I know all about the load it puts on a server.
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