geekhack

geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: bgoodr on Sat, 01 April 2023, 11:23:37

Title: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: bgoodr on Sat, 01 April 2023, 11:23:37: I need to search only a GeekHack Community (forum?, subforum?), e.g., the Input Devices forum (https://geekhack.org/index.php?board=71.0) and none others. I might need this for other communities here too in the future. But, when I navigate to that forum, I do not see any search field that is specifically for searching that community, and only that community:

(https://i.stack.imgur.com/wrtiD.png)

I do see how to search all communities, but that is specifically not what I'm looking for.

If this is simply not available, that is a viable answer, and I'll find out some other way to go about my searches.

Thanks!
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: Leslieann on Sat, 01 April 2023, 14:00:46: The top left search is just a basic search.

Use advanced search or the search in the header, that takes you to the advanced page.
On the search page, at the bottom of the search box, where it says "Search All", uncheck that.

Note that if nothing changes, click the header of the search all box (where it now says " Choose a board to search in, or search all"), this should let you pick and choose. It sometimes does this if you have any of the boards compressed during normal viewing.
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: CaesarAZealad on Sun, 02 April 2023, 14:24:39: The search is so ****y. Sometimes you need to be in a certain subforum, sometimes you need to be on the home page, sometimes it just doesn't want to work at all!
Like my romantic life in high school, just experiment until something clicks and you get lucky.
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: bgoodr on Mon, 03 April 2023, 10:54:04: Quote from: Leslieann on Sat, 01 April 2023, 14:00:46
The top left search is just a basic search.

Use advanced search or the search in the header, that takes you to the advanced page.
On the search page, at the bottom of the search box, where it says "Search All", uncheck that.

Note that if nothing changes, click the header of the search all box (where it now says " Choose a board to search in, or search all"), this should let you pick and choose. It sometimes does this if you have any of the boards compressed during normal viewing.

I have no doubt that works.

(https://i.stack.imgur.com/yH2dE.png)

blocks me dead in my tracks on the "populate serial bus for keyboard connectivity" (I know it is USB) and now I've pretty much forgotten what I was searching for, as the buffer overflow of that search page manual extra interrogation tactics killed my short-term memory. Yes, I know those questions are designed to protect us from the terrorists and script kiddies wielding keyboards, but now I've lost interest, and I'm sure everyone else has too by the time they finish this sentence.
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: Leslieann on Mon, 03 April 2023, 12:55:39: I don't see any of that verification stuff.
Are you logged in, if you are it could be due to low post count.

If all else fails, try Google or DDG and do a site specific search.
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: noisyturtle on Tue, 04 April 2023, 17:22:36: Q: How do I search on GeekHack?

A: You don't
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: bgoodr on Wed, 05 April 2023, 09:45:23: (Disclaimer: I do realize and appreciate that there is a site like this, and that I can use it to find very useful information, and I do appreciate the work that has been put into it by volunteers. THANK YOU, whoever you are and where-ever you are!)

Quote from: Leslieann on Mon, 03 April 2023, 12:55:39
I don't see any of that verification stuff.
Are you logged in, if you are it could be due to low post count.

I could not reproduce the error with the verification stuff so it could be one or both of those causes, given that I redid the experiment only after logging in to geekhack, and saw it fail to find some text string that I have manually verified actually exists in that sub-community. I have to speculate that there must not have been any regression testing done on that search feature, or did, but then they stopped running regression tests:

(https://i.stack.imgur.com/o5HAe.png)

Quote from: Leslieann on Mon, 03 April 2023, 12:55:39
If all else fails, try Google or DDG and do a site specific search.

That does work, but it relies upon Google to webscrape the data. Unfortunately, DDG did not scrape this site as shown by:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ageekhack.org+%22fav+mouse%22&ia=web

So if some subset of the user community desire to avoid Google tracking their searches, then that subset is probably going to more frustrated by this search engine defect.

I checked https://deskthority.net/ and their search engine appears to work and without a phone-tree like time-waster with spammer-avoiding questions like is done in geekhack. But their search engine seems to not respect double-quotes in their searches, so I would be cranky by using their search engine too.

Given the above, I think we are probably going to have to accept that something like Reddit, or Google search engines, will doom any per-website search engines, because of the sheer mass of employees that are paid to work at both of those giants, versus what we have here.

Alright, folks, off to Google I go and thus I will "take a chill pill, Bill". ^)^
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: bgoodr on Wed, 05 April 2023, 09:47:16: Quote from: bgoodr on Wed, 05 April 2023, 09:45:23
<snip>

And OT from this is that, when I click the Post button, then the web site moves to the https://geekhack.org/index.php?board=33.0 page and does not stay on the same thread that I just posted to. So that is a defect. Another regression test that was not added or executed there.
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: Leslieann on Wed, 05 April 2023, 13:50:23: DDG uses a combo of Bing and Google, not just Google.
I'll admit it's a bit unintuitive, but I usually manage to find what I'm after using it.

As for not returning to the thread you posted, it's not a matter of testing, that's simply the default setting in the board software. I don't remember if it's available in a personal setting or not but there is a board-wide setting that can change it, mods just decided not to enable it or they're just unaware it exists. Not a bug regardless.
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: dvorcol on Sun, 23 April 2023, 11:02:08: Quote from: bgoodr on Wed, 05 April 2023, 09:45:23
I could not reproduce the error with the verification stuff so it could be one or both of those causes, given that I redid the experiment only after logging in to geekhack, and saw it fail to find some text string that I have manually verified actually exists in that sub-community. I have to speculate that there must not have been any regression testing done on that search feature, or did, but then they stopped running regression tests:

Show Image
(https://i.stack.imgur.com/o5HAe.png)

In addition to searching in only one board, checking the "Search in topic subjects only" box further reduces the search pool.

(https://i.postimg.cc/637RxLRX/230423a-topic-only.png)

This found three topics. No idea if it's comprehensive, but better than nothing.
(https://i.postimg.cc/y6fVq4j0/230423c-topic-only.png)

Edit: Note that sometimes it helps to be a bit vague when specifying what to search for. In this case, searching for "favorite mouse" wouldn't have found #1 "What your fav mouse?"
Title: Re: How do I search a specific forum inside GeekHack?
Post by: bgoodr on Mon, 24 April 2023, 08:52:00: Quote from: dvorcol on Sun, 23 April 2023, 11:02:08
Note that sometimes it helps to be a bit vague when specifying what to search for. In this case, searching for "favorite mouse" wouldn't have found #1 "What your fav mouse?"

Understood. Note that "fav mouse" was a contrived search string, and I was intending to search _exactly_ for the string "fav string", and here's why: I used "fav mouse" in my OP because it was a string that I found to exist in another thread simply by browsing around a bit. I earlier thought it should have been found with my searches, but it did not work they way I wanted it to work, as we have determined here, not without a lot of workarounds. But at least there are workarounds.

Thanks for your and everyone elses advice here!! This is a GREAT community! :)