stupid search question

ps. checked the faq, checked the search help, checked the boolean search instructions, searched "search" on ilx, no help.

I'm in the same boat.

I'm not sure you can do that. The search function here is notorious and often complained about.

the short answer is that right now you can't, but this is changing and soon you will be able to perform board-specific search

intitle:residents inurl:boardid=41 site:ilxor.com

ok, figured out a quick workaround:

google: "your search term" +http://www.ilxor.com/ILX

no, i take it back, a few different searches like that indicates that that doesn't work very well after all. crap.

> intitle:residents inurl:boardid=41 site:ilxor.com

sweet! that works. thanks :)

^^wait, so how do I use this? Do I just plug that into google along with my search term and it only searches ilm (or boardid=whatever for whatever board)? Or do I plug that into the ilx search?

Change "residents" to whatever you like or omit "intitle:residents" altogether if you don't want to do a title-based search.

Yes, use it in Google.

Awesome, thanks for the workaround.

it might be worth mentioning that the insite search function now seems to be functioning much better than before. in fact, i would venture to say, better than the workaround mentioned above - at least for me, just a second ago, for searching one word in the title of a thread. you can just click search (not stupid search question) at the top of the page, type into the first search box (which defaults to title search) then easily narrow your search to one or all of the ilxor lists now.

however, while this search function is working, erm, fairly well... it's still a bit wonky. i got some strangely random results a few times from all sorts of things: boolean searches, user searches, searching ilm vs. searching all, etc. then again, the above workaround via google (intitle:yoursearchterm inurl:boardid=41 site:ilxor.com) is probably equally wonky, but in different ways. so, if you're trying to do some advanced searching, it still might be worth trying both the inhouse search function and google or whatever...

so, does anyone have further helpful suggestions for advanced searching of this nice but wonky site? or should i just shut up and get used to it?

I'd like to know how to find a post by a particular ilxor without having to know their e-mail address.

The example given now is text:"nu shooz" AND loginId:myemailaddr✧✧✧@addr✧✧✧.c✧✧, but what if I wanted to find a post made by someone else?

Check out "The fields you can use are" - immediately under that example. Except that it doesn't find your BEST ALTERNATE PARKINSONS SUFFERER poll opening post when I search like this:

text:"Michael Mukasey" AND displayName:"Pleasant Plains"

Hopefully it is better than before, because I rewrote it from scratch.

Pleasant Plains, it'll work for display names too, so text:"nu shooz" AND displayName:"Pleasant Plains". Oops sorry, you just said that, Stan.

I don't know if the thing it didn't find was very new. Things aren't indexed immediately. A job runs every ten minutes and indexes all the things posted in the last ten minutes, so anything very recent (the last few minutes), might not yet be found in the search.

The post I was looking for, to check if displayName worked, was from "Wednesday, June 17, 2009 8:16 PM (1 week ago)" - but then it WAS the opening post of a poll thread, maybe that's why it didn't work as expected (I think I read that mods have problems seeing poll posts or something? Or was that only when images were involved? anyway, opening posts of polls are somehow different)

Wonder if that was because it was part of a poll question.

Duh. 8:16 PM is just my time zone, obv.

Thanks for the tip. I kept trying displaynameid to no avail.

Does this only work with thread titles?

e.g. say I want to find this post: Should Knut die?

and I look using

text:"fruitcake" AND displayName:"burt_stanton"

I get nothing.

but if I search for

text:"Knut" AND displayName:"StanM"

I get the thread (both the title and the opening post contain "Knut") as a search result.

Hmm. Not sure. Was a year ago I wrote this stuff. Without actually looking at the code, I wonder if it is tacking on the title to the query too. So maybe the instructions are what's wrong.

As for polls, I don't think it should be an issue, as they're basically just the first message in a thread. The actual contents of the poll isn't indexed, but I would have to do work to prevent the first message being indexed, so that shouldn't be an issue.

It probably is the first thing. I'll take a look when I'm next looking.

Ah OK. Bit confusing.

With the: text:"fruitcake" AND displayName:"burt_stanton"

Example, you also need to click "Posts" or it does default to searching the thread index. It's because there are two separate actual indexes: one for threads, and another for messages. If you do the threads one, it searches the threads index and naturally doesn't find it.

Oh and the mods and polls thing is just a bug. Ought to get round to fixing that.

Thanks! For everything! You rule!