Some ranchers may have noticed that the search page has recently changed, and since the new page contains some long-requested new features, we wanted to say a few words about it.
It's now possible to search through several, or all, forums. This has often been requested, but was not possible so far due to the load being placed on the system. Results are listed in reverse chronological order, but can be grouped by forum. There's also a sort option "by relevance". That only works if (one or more) search terms are entered, i.e. not for searches for member name/ID. It's possible to search for a member name in addition to member ID (just check the appropriate checkbox) For a member, all threads containing his or her posts can be shown, or just the ones started by her (again, a checkbox). There's also a link titled "Show my posts" that does the same thing. There's no longer a limit of 400 results. So, if you are searching for all your posts, and you have been posting a lot, you will get many pages of results. This, too, was a frequent request. There is an upper limit of results, though, beyond which the user is asked for a more specific search request. Otherwise, accessing all results would take up too much memory. Search plugins for Firefox are available, both for the Saloon and the FAQ wiki. For the Saloon, FF 2.0 is required, for the FAQ both FF 1.x and 2.0 are supported. The index is being updated every few minutes with the latest posts, so it may take a short while until a recent post can be found.If a search didn't find the results you were looking for, clicking the "Search again" link will take you back to the search page, with all fields prepopulated with the parameters you originally entered. Note that the number of topics is shown, not the number of posts you see elsewhere in the Saloon, so you will get a lower number than your current post count if you search for all your posts. Last but not least: The search is implemented in Java, proving that we actually do what we preach, even though the rest of the Saloon still isn't. In particular, the fantastic Apache Lucene library is used, without which this would not be possible. If you see strange results, or have ideas for further improvements, be sure to let us know about it.
[ February 22, 2007: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]
