Response notifications.

Scioch

I'm not a developer now or very clued in to the workings of forums so bear with me.

In the user cp you have numerous things to track your posts. You can search posts, thanked posts, posts you've thanked etc etc.

But you cant search and list responses that have quoted your posts. Perhaps a feature in the notification drop down menu that does this or even in the statistics part of the profile page.

I dont know how it would work exactly but I'm thinking search for "Originally posted by *username*" and then displaying the post within which that text was found.

It would be a great feature to keep track of discussions in large threads that you dont really have time to read or scan every page to interact with people talking to you directly.

seamus

http://www.boards.ie/search2/submit/?query="Originally posted by LordSmeg"

It's not ideal because it's a text search. So if someone quotes your post but removes your name, it's not possible to track that. Equally, someone can spoof it such as,

LordSmeg wrote: »

I am a big silly head

The developers can tell us if the link above is a big performance concern, but it should do what you need it to.

Edit: The above actually doesn't work at all for you, it only works for my username because of much older posts.

It should be possible to some extent to do a "Quoted" search, but again it can't possibly give every post quoting one of yours and there may be performance concerns.

Scioch

seamus wrote: »

http://www.boards.ie/search2/submit/?query="Originally posted by LordSmeg"

It's not ideal because it's a text search. So if someone quotes your post but removes your name, it's not possible to track that. Equally, someone can spoof it such as,



The developers can tell us if the link above is a big performance concern, but it should do what you need it to.

Edit: The above actually doesn't work at all for you, it only works for my username because of much older posts.

It should be possible to some extent to do a "Quoted" search, but again it can't possibly give every post quoting one of yours and there may be performance concerns.

I wouldnt be too worried about missing a quote where some has doctored the name and there would be very few spoofs I'd imagine and the "view post" link I assume would accompany it to link it back to the original post anyway.

A quoted search would give every post which has "originally quoted by lordsmeg" with a full quote though wouldnt it ? Your essentially only searching with the parameters of an enclosed quote containing the quote heading with x username.

Would performance be much of an issue seeing as it would be a smaller search field than a regular search ?

seamus

LordSmeg wrote: »

A quoted search would give every post which has "originally quoted by lordsmeg" with a full quote though wouldnt it ? Your essentially only searching with the parameters of an enclosed quote containing the quote heading with x username.

In the database, it's stored as part of the post text, such as [QUOTE=LordSmeg;79770359]. When displaying the page, this is then interpreted on-the-fly to show, "Originally posted by ...".
So the only way to do a search is by using the standard text search, slightly tweaked. But the search engine would still have to go through every post in the database looking for the text "QUOTE=LordSmeg;"

It's not any easier from the search engine's point of view. In fact, it can be a little bit harder because you would have to do a wildcard search to some degree, and the actual text being searched for is not natural language and not a whole word and so may not be very well indexed.
That's where performance issues come in.

Boards.ie: Paddy

seamus wrote: »

In the database, it's stored as part of the post text, such as [QUOTE=LordSmeg;79770359]. When displaying the page, this is then interpreted on-the-fly to show, "Originally posted by ...".
So the only way to do a search is by using the standard text search, slightly tweaked. But the search engine would still have to go through every post in the database looking for the text "QUOTE=LordSmeg;"

It's not any easier from the search engine's point of view. In fact, it can be a little bit harder because you would have to do a wildcard search to some degree, and the actual text being searched for is not natural language and not a whole word and so may not be very well indexed.
That's where performance issues come in.

Your searches go nowhere near the database these days. They're all passed off to our SOLR cluster, which isn't even in the same cab. SOLR is pretty good at free text search (although current plans are to make it a lot better next month) so hammer it all you want, all you can possibly break is search.

seamus

Good to know.

Though the actual search engine strips particular characters out of the search string, so it's not possible to search specifically for "QUOTE=LordSmeg;" and have it bring back the desired results.

So this is something which you guys would have to do by way of a particular link.

Though Google can do the same job, just not as nicely:

https://www.google.ie/search?q=%22Originally+Posted+by+LordSmeg%22+site%3Aboards.ie

philologos

I think the search function has changed. When I search my username now it doesn't bring up posts where my posts have been quoted. If that functionality was brought back that would be enough for me really.

Boards.ie: Paddy

We've added a new link on your user profile page under the statistics tab.

It says "Find posts that quote {username}". It should allow you to do a vanity search with the new search system. We'll investigate adding it to the general search UI but until that time it should solve your problem.

Scioch

Excellent, thank you kindly Paddy.