Posts: 283
Threads: 33
Joined: Jul 2008
I'd like to second the suggestion for a better search engine. I've been trying to use the Google hack but the results returned can be very limited.
However, rather than fixing the search engine, it might be worth spending the time on upgrading the entire forum to a more universal and modern standard such as phpBB. I know the existing forum has a certain "charm" with its rather unusual method of operation and style but I am sure that nearly everyone would agree that usability is not its strong-point, especially when compared to a typical php forum.
Having said all that, I do recognise that the current forum might be fairly immune to the majority of hacking/spamming/intrusion methods that target php so if the change was made, administration duties might increase. Perhaps some members might like to volunteer to help with this?
Mark
Posts: 6
Threads: 0
Joined: Feb 2007
Quote:
In my opinion all it needs is a better search Forum search engine. Then we could easily find threads on all of Martin's subjects.
BTW, I know there was a thread on forum searchability recently but I couldn't be bothered to use Google to search for it as it doesn't always work (e.g. sometimes the links don't always work when it's recently moved into the archives).
It doesn't need just a better search engine: it also needs to ditch the concept of archives.
Really, a thread should be a continuous conversation until people stop posting to it. With the archive system, you lose a lot of context whenever messages are archived.
If you want to achieve the same thing as viewing threads as if they started on a given day, the forum software should be able to achieve that relatively easily, but you should always be able to painlessly view prior messages if you so desire.
I've always wondered why we have the archiving thing going when the amount of disk space required by the entire history of this forum is probably a tiny fraction of a single modern hard drive...