Question Search by treads

Hrllo everybody,
I come with an other issue that has been posted on my website, and it is the possibility to make searches by treads, but without listing all the posts of this treads... Actually, I can make searches by posts and by title, but not by treads. Is is possibile to make it possible to make it only by treads (or discussions)?


Thank you very much for your attention
Gbastia

To be completely honest with you, I think whoever asked you for that feature is being lazy! :laugh: I'm sorry if that might seem blunt, but that's my opinion.

If you have a small thread (say, two or three postings) it takes very little time to read what's been written anyway. A search-by-thread feature won't improve the time it takes to open the thread and browse the information you might be looking for.

Unless you know what thread you are searching for, I would imagine that search-by-thread won't save any more time than search-by-category or search across the whole forum. For instance, when I'm searching for information here at www.kunena.com , I very rarely confine my search to a date range or to a specific discussion category or categories.

While this idea is the product of someone's vivid imagination, I can't see any merit investing your time and energy to create another pull-down list, of all the threads within a specific category (for example) or all the threads within your discussion forum either. I certainly can't see any point in me using such a feature.

Therefore, I would respond to the person who made that request of you (in the nicest possible way of course) and explain that, unless there is strong support for this feature, you won't commit to making a decision or assigning the matter a high priority.

Hi,
What you tell meis true for a small forum, but the problem is that I have a forum with 95130 posts and 5218 treads, and some treads haves undreds of posts, so if put a keyword present in some of these treads, I have something about 40 pages in the search result and it become very hard to find exactly what you want...
For exemple, if I put in this forum the keyword "search", in the adv src, I found something like 430 results and 29 pages, and if I don't consider the posts of the same tread, it will reduce the results in something about 4 or 5 pages, witch is much better (IMHO)... Don't you thik?
Gbastia

Thank you for your reply. This makes for a good discussion.

Even with large discussions, say several hundred posts, most people are mainly interested in the newest messages. Unless people have a need to review a discussion to see if someone may have "changed their tune" you want to quote from something written pages ago, does it matter?

Yes, of course, if you search for the keyword "search" (a common word in a technical forum) you may obtain 430 results spread over 29 pages. In cases like these you refine your search criteria, you restrict the search to a date range, or a specific category of discussions, or you add extra words like "search by category" for example.

Basically, I'm trying to make the point that you can achieve what you want by thinking smarter. I agree, sometimes it doesn't work (try searching for information at www.microsoft.com , for example) and you might spend hours digging for "buried treasure". Sometimes we never find exactly what we want ... vive la différence!

gbastia wrote:

... the problem is that I have a forum with 95130 posts and 5218 treads, and some treads haves undreds of posts, so if put a keyword present in some of these treads, I have something about 40 pages in the search result and it become very hard to find exactly what you want...

Hello

I have the same problem : a lot of threads AND for a lot of threads ... a lot of replies !!

If possible, a search by thread (as an option) would be ... a lot appreciated :woohoo:

Let us suppose that this feature could be designed and constructed. How would it look?

If you want to offer your users the ability to search by discussion topic, you need to provide them with the ability to specify what topic they should look for. Let us suppose you run a query, as part of the Advanced Search feature, to generate a list of all the discussion topics and use that list to populate a SELECT list. This would result in something like



You'll see, even with a sorted list of topics like I've shown, this list could be quite long (you've said there are about 5218 entries) which your users have to scroll through in order to find the topic, or topics, that they want. Then the results of the users selection, or multiple selections, have to be passed to the SQL query.

I'm not an expert on SQL performance, but I would imagine this will imply some extra processor load on the server. Certainly, in order to reduce processing load for the sake of improving these kinds of searches, the discussion subject column in the table would need to be stored as an index.

Perhaps you have a better design? Would you like to share your design ideas with us?