eGullet

Currently the ip board defaults to a minimum of 4 characters for search. This may be a due to limitations in MySQL full text search but it breaks search for many thousands of people by returning an error and makes our sites very unfriendly places to search.

Typically, many or most people these days search for phrases or ask questions. It's highly successful in Google to simply ask a question and it's my main method of searching. Many of these phrases or questions will contain some words using less than the 4 allowed. So instead of returning a failed search with an annoying and potentially confusing error - why not just ignore any words below the minimum characters and at least return results with the other words a user searched for?

For example: The following, perfectly legitimate real-world searches on this IPS Community just fail with an error message in a red box.

• how can i upgrade my ips board?
  
• how much does it cost to buy ip.board?
  
• what is ip.content?

These are searches from people interested in buying. Similar searches on my ip.board and every one else's result in the same disappointing results. We all know people soon get frustrated and go elsewhere don't we?

So instead of frustrating our users, can't the search simply ignore all words below the threshold and return at least some results?

The results page could still have an advisory box saying that certain words were not used in the search.

So now searches for the three examples I mentioned will all produce some results and the advisory box can subtly inform and educate users that they need to use words longer than 4 (or whatever it's been customised to) letters.

Any chance that tag auto-completion could be implemented before the 3.2 release?

I've been playing around with the new tag system to see if I should use it for my site.  I would like to be able to have auto-completion as the user types in a tag name, so that there is a greater chance that people use the same tags as often as is appropriate.  I don't want users to be confused as to whether to use the plural of a tag name or some alternate spelling,  The autocomplete suggestions would like the most frequently used tags that match the typing first.  

Without autocompletion, I think I might have to go with a closed tag system where I have to list all appropriate tags for the forum, but I don't like this since it may be limiting and harder to maintain.  Better to allow users to make up their own tags.  I also don't know how good an interface this would be if I listed 100 or more possible predefined tags.

I think it might be better to have a big list of predefined tags, but have the option to do tag completion within the closed system.  So, the user would be shown the preferred tags to use but still be able to type in new ones not in the list.  Then, if I could moderate the new ones and decide to add them to the predefined list, then I could better control the tags used and still allow the users to request new tags to be added.

Anyway, the input of the tags just doesn't seem to be as finished as it should be to end up with good tags that can be used to find all related topics.

Hi,

When we merge two topics, the one that was deleted will just disappear and the response we get is 404 error.
I suggest that we get a 301 redirect to the one where the posts where sent.

Thanks

Any chance you might consider rendering ATTACHMENTS and SHAREDMEDIA BBCode in the CKEditor when these BBCodes are inserted by the 'Add to post' or 'My Media' links?  The Insert Image button shows the image inline so I would think you could translate the BBCode into an IMG tag with an attribute or comment that remembers the original BBCode.  I want this IMG tag to render the attachment just like it will appear in the post.

I'd just like my members to never see BBCode if using the RTE.