Search Broken
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Hi, admins!
Not sure if this is the right forum section, but the search function seems to be broken. It yields the following output when used:
Internal Error.
Oops! Looks like something went wrong!/api/search
Cannot read property 'length' of undefined
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What browser / device?
What skin?
(Search is working fine here.)
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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The search function itself seems to be weird for me, I put in a word and then it keeps popping up postings that don't even contain the word... though I thought that was just bad search code, the internal error though I have fixed by logging out and logging back in, no idea if it will work for you.
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Yeah, Search hasn't worked for me in over a year. It just comes up with unrelated posts.
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The unrelated posts it has done as long as I can remember.
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It's always been awful.
I assumed this was unfixable but if it's not, great!
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Yeah, I've been using google search for our domain for years. The built-in nodebb functionality is terrible - I suppose I can look if there's a plugin that works better than the default.
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@auspice Chrome, on my Windows 10 PC. Cerulean skin.
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Has search for this forum software ever been any good? It’s often better to Google your search with
site:musoapbox.neton the end.“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain said in Search Broken:
Has search for this forum software ever been any good? It’s often better to Google your search with
site:musoapbox.neton the end.Yeah, p. much this. nodebb itself has bad search. That won't be fixable on our end. That's on the developers of nodebb.
I'm trying to focus this on @Brunocerous and their specific bug.
Did you try the suggestion of logging out/back in, by chance?
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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Can we rejigger the old Google-integrated search we had?
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There's not a single function/program/app that can convert this DB into something compatible with any other decent forum software? Not one?
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@tnp said in Search Broken:
There's not a single function/program/app that can convert this DB into something compatible with any other decent forum software? Not one?
I looked. But also other platforms are either even more immature (tee-hee) than nodebb, they're not free, or they don't have some of the built-in convenient features nodebb is actually great for (such as a chat).
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel So help me, I wish there was some kind of wiki-based solution to the problem. I would feel at least a tiny shred less useless in terms of ability to help if such a thing was indeed a thing. There are 'forum style extensions', but it's not the same thing, I don't think. If I knew of any that I had hammered around to see how they work/etc., I'd let you know, since arguably it could potentially solve the 'ad thread' thing with just an ad page for a game with autolinks to various threads or pages about it, people could set up their user pages with their shout in the dark style things, etc. But it's still just not really at all the same animal, and there's no protection from one person editing another person's words. (That, in a nutshell, is the core fail.)
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality I'm not sure nodebb is that bad after looking at other options. We even considered thinking-out-of-the-box approaches such as Discord.
Frankly nothing I've seen at least is more geared toward having involved, sometimes deep discussions not taking place in real time than a forum does.
Also nodebb is pretty active. It will has and will continue to add features over time so things will likely improve going forward rather than regress.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in Search Broken:
@surreality I'm not sure nodebb is that bad after looking at other options. We even considered thinking-out-of-the-box approaches such as Discord.
The MU community could make use of real-time chat for shooting the breeze, a wiki (as @surreality mentions) for static, updatable information, and of course a forum for in-depth discussions. There doesn't exist a free tool that does it all well, and having multiple signons (or getting SSO to work) for multiple tools would be a pain. I don't really see a huge value in switching. NodeBB at least does two out of the three, even if it's not ideal. It is one of the more reputable and established forum software systems out there.
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@faraday To be honest a Discord server linked directly from here, and with a bot keeping users up to date on new posts on that side could work.
My only reservation is that I don't want to have to be responsible for or police one more thing as well, especially since our local trolls find their way there. And there's no way I'd enable voicechat on one either way
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...actually, dumb as this may sound, has anybody talked to Chime about any of this?
I know TR was set up with a MUX (real time chat and private messaging, channels, private discussion spaces even possible even if it's just a place to make temprooms off of to chat with someone that way for brainstorming or whatever else), a mediawiki install (permanent data), and a forum (not nodeBB, but I think one of the other standard sorts that gets used a lot without much issue).
I know she's not hosting any more, but that... actually nails all the criteria described and then some, would add a fuckton of functionality and additional options, and even if she's not hosting, perhaps she could offer instruction for a means of setting something like that up?
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said in Search Broken:
perhaps she could offer instruction for a means of setting something like that up?
It's not really that complicated, technically-speaking, it's just a PITA. Any time you have multiple tools working together you have a fragile ecosystem trying to keep them all independently up to date and working happily with each other. And as @Arkandel mentions, that's then multiple "fronts" that you have to police against trolls.
I looked into this issue extensively when exploring solutions for AresMUSH, and ultimately came to the conclusion that having everything under one roof was for the best even if that roof has limitations. But that's just my 2 cents. Either way could be made to work with enough elbow grease.
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@faraday said in Search Broken:
It's not really that complicated, technically-speaking, it's just a PITA. Any time you have multiple tools working together you have a fragile ecosystem trying to keep them all independently up to date and working happily with each other.
That's my problem. If say, the search functionality was pissing me off enough I could just look into the code and figure out what makes it find matches so... badly. But then I'd have to make sure it continues to work when we update nodebb versions, future plugins, etc.
And this is with one moving part. Add more to the mix and it's a hard no.
Also keep in mind staying at the current version isn't an option for us - in the past templates broke because we weren't updating the platform.
