Thread: Real-World Searches

Originally Posted by JBHoren

Acting angry doesn't solve problems, but being angry is often THE motivating force for growth and positive change. I'm into the latter, not the former.

Acting angry doesn't solve problems, but being angry is often THE motivating force for growth and positive change. I'm into the latter, not the former. I didn't (and don't) expect anyone to do anything. I'm happy to have an explanation. A little scrutiny never hurt anyone. You don't have to do me any favors -- I'm not your friend, not your buddy; just a guy with a question about something he noticed that didn't jibe with his professional experience. If "anger" is an issue for you, a PM would've been better... and I could've told you privately to sod-off, rather than having to do it here, in public.

Uhm, nobody owes you an explanation. I could've just as easy ignored your post, or taken the attitude that 'if you don't like something, don't use it'.
I'm pretty sure that after 27 years of unix experience you must have noticed that this forum is not a unix shell, and I have no idea why would you expect regular expressions to work.
Of course, I like to hear about people's experience and suggestions, but you didn't really offer any. I don't really care for people acting as if they are entitled to anything, and that's exactly how your original post came out as. If you're just going to be making snarky comments, please save your breath, I don't have any use for them either.

See, the difference between you and me is that I have spent hundreds of hours making sure that when you type straightrazorplace.com in your browser you don't end up to a 'page not found', while all you have done is complain that something isn't working the way you want it to work, without offering even the tiniest amount of practical contribution towards solving it. Despite your playing with the semantics your angry state hasn't motivated you to do anything constructive, so yeah, it is pretty useless.

Finally, I certainly wish that you and everybody else does think twice before posting anything on this site, or anywhere else for that matter. A little bit of extra thinking rarely hurts.

Have fun.

Originally Posted by gugi

A little bit of extra thinking rarely hurts.

Have fun.

Truly, words to live by.

Originally Posted by Theseus

Truly, words to live by.

+1 for that and look at this http://straightrazorpalace.com/site-...e-service.html

I just discovered a problem with Google Custom Search results. Specifically, the results are displayed as URLs for the thread(s) in which the search terms are found, referenced to the page of postings on which the particular post is located (see below).



Unfortunately, the "Page" is calculated using the SRP default number of posts per/page, and is entirely inaccurate for anyone who has configured their settings for a different number of posts per/page (I, of course, am such a user, with my SRP General Settings configured for 40 posts per/page). What happens is that once I follow the URL, I then need to perform a "Search Thread" for the original search term(s), in order to access the relevant posts.

Would it not be more helpful to our users to have the Google Custom Search configured to return the full URL for each post found, rather than referencing an incorrect "page"?

Originally Posted by JBHoren

Would it not be more helpful to our users to have the Google Custom Search configured to return the full URL for each post found, rather than referencing an incorrect "page"?

Well, obviously the google bots use the default pagination. It would be indeed more helpful if Google Custom Search would return the permalinks to the posts. May be you can look into this and find out if it is possible and how to do it? I don't have the time to do everything, so if you think some feature would be useful the best way to make it happen is to do as much of the leg work as you can and leave for me only the part that requires admin powers.

Figuring out the nature of a problem is a good thing (certainly better than just complaining about a problem), but figuring out the solution is much much better.

Originally Posted by JBHoren

I just discovered a problem with Google Custom Search results. Specifically, the results are displayed as URLs for the thread(s) in which the search terms are found, referenced to the page of postings on which the particular post is located (see below).

[Attachment removed]

Unfortunately, the "Page" is calculated using the SRP default number of posts per/page, and is entirely inaccurate for anyone who has configured their settings for a different number of posts per/page (I, of course, am such a user, with my SRP General Settings configured for 40 posts per/page). What happens is that once I follow the URL, I then need to perform a "Search Thread" for the original search term(s), in order to access the relevant posts.

Would it not be more helpful to our users to have the Google Custom Search configured to return the full URL for each post found, rather than referencing an incorrect "page"?

Originally Posted by gugi

Well, obviously the google bots use the default pagination. It would be indeed more helpful if Google Custom Search would return the permalinks to the posts. May be you can look into this and find out if it is possible and how to do it? I don't have the time to do everything, so if you think some feature would be useful the best way to make it happen is to do as much of the leg work as you can and leave for me only the part that requires admin powers.

Figuring out the nature of a problem is a good thing (certainly better than just complaining about a problem), but figuring out the solution is much much better.

Huh... and here I thought I did offer a solution to the problem, one which is implicit in my description of that problem: Change the SRP default posts-per/page to "40". That would fix my issue. I honestly have no idea how many SRP members bother to reconfigure their General Settings to values other than the defaults; what I do know is that most people who change the value for Posts-per/page set it to the maximum possible.

Thoughts?

Right, but your proposal will 'fix' your issue and will break it for almost everybody else because the vast majority of the members indeed use the default setting. Why won't you switch to the default instead?
It is true that we didn't poll everybody what the default post number should be, but 20 is the number in the default configuration from the software programmers, so I would venture to say that that's the predominant setting in the phase space of all vbulletin forums it's. It just doesn't make sense to make a change which would benefit only a small minority at the expense of the vast majority.

BTW my pagination is 40post/page as well, and I am also inconvenienced by the way google does things, however as a staff member I am always doing what's best for the forum not what's most convenient for me.

Now, a solution where the google search uses the permalink is something that makes sense as it is robust against variations in the user preference.