ibe98765 Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 I tried to do a search for the phrase "the bat" and got the following error: Sorry, an error occured. If you are unsure on how to use a feature, or don't know why you got this error message, try looking through the help files for more information.The error returned was: Sorry, but we did not find any matches to display. Try again and broaden your search criteria. If you were searching for new posts since your last visit, it's possible that there are none to show.Not a very helpful error message! Anyone know what the real problem is?
SonicDragon Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 Strage... it works for me.Did u change any of the other options?Did this happen only one time or do u keep gettin the error message?
Arena2045 Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 ibe,The search doesn't allow the use of quotation marks.
ibe98765 Posted January 3, 2004 Author Posted January 3, 2004 ibe,The search doesn't allow the use of quotation marks.It would be nice if it said that!So how do you differentiate between searching for 2 or more keywords and a phrase search?
Guest LilBambi Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 From Forum "Help": Searching Topics and PostsThe search feature is designed to allow you to quickly find topics and posts that contain the keywords you enter.The 'Simple Search' option from the drop down box allows you to enter a single keyword or phrase to search by - the advanced option allows you to join keywords with 'AND', 'OR' to fine tune the search. Using this option will make the search slightly slower.The bottom section of the form allows you to further fine tune the search. You can choose a category to search in, or a forum - or choose all forums to search in.If you enter a name into the 'Search by member name' section, all posts started or replied in by this member are returned.
ibe98765 Posted January 3, 2004 Author Posted January 3, 2004 Without the use of quotes, it is impossible to get good results. I thought I remembered that the email client "The Bat" (what a stupid name for an email program!) was mentioned somewhere here in the last 8 months or so. But searching for the phrase without quotes over the last 365 days produced 5 pages of hits including gems like "the bathroom". I eyeballed through the list but found only one with a subject related to email and nothing was in there. Without quotes, there isn't any way to indicate that these are separate words, not part of another word or phrase. So then I tried to do an advanced search using the bat AND emailBut this generated the error:One or all of your search keywords were below 4 characters, please go back and increase the length of these search keywords. Apparently, you can't combine a phrase and boolean search, another gotcha for not supporting quoted strings.btw: I thought after we had the discussion on the restriction here of a 4 character minimum search length, that the setting was going to be changed to 2 characters for a while to see if it caused any performance problems on the board? Now would be a good time to do this...
Arena2045 Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 (edited) ibe,There is nothing that we can do to allow the search to use quotation marks… it’s the way IPS wrote the search; nothing is perfect.I changed the character limit for a short period this morning and did some test searches using various combinations: the bat AND email, bat AND email, the AND bat AND email, etc…And the results were hundreds of threads that had posts with the letters bat as part of a word or countless mentions of email. Thus these hundreds of results were virtually useless.I did however find the mention of “the bat†using search criteria that work with the 4-character limit. Using searches combinations (using AND) with words like: email, e-mail, client, outlook express and alternative… produced some better results.If you do a search for “e-mail and client and alternative†under every open forum from any date, the 5th result has a post from Scot mentioning “the bat†email client. Yes, it’s only one post, but I think you get the point that using different search criteria will produce different results to wade through.We just have to be creative in choosing search criteria. Edited January 3, 2004 by Arena2045
SonicDragon Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 Well, if u can't find it on the forums,Here's The Bat's webpage
Arena2045 Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 SonicDragon,Where is the fun in giving the URL to ibe? Was trying to show ibe that creative search criteria would provide the answer he was looking for at the forums.
SonicDragon Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 Was trying to show ibe that creative search criteria would provide the answer he was looking for at the forums. *blush* i cheated anyway. guess i wan't being very creative www.google.com brought it up on the first link
ibe98765 Posted January 3, 2004 Author Posted January 3, 2004 SonicDragon,Where is the fun in giving the URL to ibe? Was trying to show ibe that creative search criteria would provide the answer he was looking for at the forums. Ha! The first thing I did was a Goggle search. But my ad filter or something seems to be blocking the loading of the page. Didn't have the time to figure this out right away, so decided to do a "quick" search here looking for was some real-life stories and experiences. Why? A shareware author I deal with consistently keeps truncating email threads. I ask why a number of times. Finally, he tells me he uses "The Bat" and it seems to be automatically truncating the threads. He says he will look for a control but I thought I would look into this also.Using creative search terms is essentially worthless when you can't focus on the actual subject because of IPB limitations or artificial limitations imposed by TPTB.
Guest LilBambi Posted January 4, 2004 Posted January 4, 2004 Maybe now might be a good time to find out what your browser problem is so you can go see for yourself the huge list of features at "The Bat" website and what might interfere with a message.The site is well laid out and has much information there. I did not see any reason why you should not be able to load the page simply because of some ad blocks.I noticed that "The Bat" does NOT use the Windows HTML viewer. Have you tried sending true plain text messages to the shareware provider?
Guest LilBambi Posted January 4, 2004 Posted January 4, 2004 I found quite a few entries for The Bat by just searching for The Bat.I told it to search all open forums for any date, and told it to display as posts rather than topics. I received 7 pages of resultant posts (most of the following results were on pages 5-6 and easy to identify the specific topic relavence by the topic title for each result:http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...=30entry19859http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...t=0entry29539http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...=15entry27104http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...2&st=0entry88http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...&st=0entry193http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.ph...t=45entry3357There were a bunch more that mention it but these others were within the topics that are listed above.Hope this helps ibe98765.
ibe98765 Posted January 4, 2004 Author Posted January 4, 2004 Thanks Bambi. That helped a bit. Had never tried the post view. Nobody has had much to say about this email client and there was only one user who said they were currently using it.One thing I found intertesting in looking at the older threads was the high number of people who have disappeared, not seeming to post here any longer. They made some posts and then poof!
Guest LilBambi Posted January 4, 2004 Posted January 4, 2004 You are welcome ibe98765. Was an easy and small thing to do to help a fellow Highlander. :)Yep, that happens on forums, particularly ones based on newsletters. Folks come in and register sometimes because they really like the forums, sometimes just so they can make a comment on something Scot mentioned in the newsletter and may or may not return, at least to post.But you do see the same thing on just about every forum across the boards. Many people come and go, and some come and stay, others still come and go and then come back again. Just like in real life. Forums really are communities. The beauty is, when someone does come back, it is like they never left or friends welcome you back and mention how glad they are to see you....just like a real life community.
Corrine Posted January 4, 2004 Posted January 4, 2004 The beauty is, when someone does come back, it is like they never left or friends welcome you back and mention how glad they are to see you....just like a real life community.Could be more so with Scot's Highlanders -- its quite a clan.
Ed_P Posted May 6, 2004 Posted May 6, 2004 If one attempts to do a Search of the forums for AOL, PCI modem, DVD ROM, CD ROM, RAM, USB drive, FDISK MBR, HP PC, CD, HD, MB, etc they get the less than useful One or all of your search keywords were below 4 characters, please go back and increase the length of these search keywords. message.How does one increase the length of AOL? Or USB? etc.Not wanting to be greedy and ask that the limitation be totally removed, would it be possible to change the search restriction to 3 characters for a month or so? I'm sure there was a reason for this restriction but I'm not sure the reason sufficiently justifies the inconvenience and only an extended test will verify that. Thanks
Arena2045 Posted May 6, 2004 Posted May 6, 2004 EdP :This topic has been brought up before. The limit is set at 4 so that a search will not bog down the system. The database is now well over 80MB and if someone choose to do a search for more common 3 letter combinations, it could prove ugly... The Senior Staff will discuss this matter again, but I can not guarantee anything.
Ed_P Posted May 6, 2004 Posted May 6, 2004 I understand the concern Arena2045 that's why I suggested it just be for a trial period to see how often it is a factor. I know I hit it about once every 10 days but that's with knowing the limit and trying to work around it. And then I have to try other searches to get what I want. The extra searchs have to be putting more of a load on the system then my finding what I want the 1st time. And a newbie looking for AOL help would be stymied right off the bat.Is there a way you could limit the search to say 10 or 20 hits per page? That would reduce the load from searching the whole 80GB at one time and may be all the majority of searchers need.Is there anything I can do to help with this?
Arena2045 Posted May 6, 2004 Posted May 6, 2004 At one point we did have a trial run of this feature; it produced spotty results and didn't perform well. At this time we have decided not to change the search limitations.
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