Issues after the update

[Saint_Chawman]

Hello,
first of all thanks for putting in the work and running this site. That said, I'm not a fan of the recent upgrade, and I would like to bring attention to just two issues here:

First, I don't understand the reason for removing view counts on stories. They provide an easy way for the writer to gauge a story's popularity/success and work as a sort of reward mechanism, and they allow readers to sort by popularity.
Second, and more importantly, I'm now facing problems using the search function when I enter keywords that are 'too short' or 'too common'. I have no idea why such a mechanism was put in place as this makes it impossible to search for certain words, for no apparent reason.

Please consider reversing these changes, they have a real negative impact on usability.

 

[FeatherEndeavor]

I haven't done that many searches since the upgrade so I can't comment on that. But as far as the view counts on the stories I know the view counts on pictures was also removed after the update. If they're viewed as an attachment you can see it but not if they're pasted into the post. Jeff said he was going to look into it and figure out why the view count was removed because that wasn't intentional. So it's possible that it's the same situation with the view count on stories. Maybe just bring it to his attention and see if he can fix it.

 

[TMF Jeff]

Hello,
first of all thanks for putting in the work and running this site. That said, I'm not a fan of the recent upgrade, and I would like to bring attention to just two issues here:

First, I don't understand the reason for removing view counts on stories. They provide an easy way for the writer to gauge a story's popularity/success and work as a sort of reward mechanism, and they allow readers to sort by popularity.
Second, and more importantly, I'm now facing problems using the search function when I enter keywords that are 'too short' or 'too common'. I have no idea why such a mechanism was put in place as this makes it impossible to search for certain words, for no apparent reason.

Please consider reversing these changes, they have a real negative impact on usability.

Unfortunately, reversing the changes isn't an option. We upgraded the forum because it had begun to run poorly for a lot of people, because it was so old. That wasn't something we had a choice about and we can't go back.

And unfortunately, forums are sold as-is. The things this forum does, and the way it does them, are built into it by the developers and we buy it from them as a package. It's a little bit like if someone said "Why is the gas pedal on the right side of my car's floor? I want it up here by my left hand." They don't make cars that way and (the extremely wealthy excluded I suppose) you can't buy one that way. Same thing here. The forum is what it is.

However, because it's in active development unlike our previous one, people do make and sell add-ons for it, so a lot of the things we're not happy with will be correctable over time.

That said, I'm not sure what you mean about view count on stories. As Endeavor said, we do have an issue with view counts on attachments, which I'm really not happy about. But every thread has a view count on this forum, just like on our previous forum. Where are you seeing something different?

As for the search, the character limit is 3, same as on the previous forum. And that's actually not something that can be fixed because it's a limitation of MYSQL itself. Essentially every forum will have that limitation.

What terms are you using that it's rejecting? That might be something I can fix in a setting somewhere.

 

[Saint_Chawman]

Hi Jeff,

I wasn't aware you had to buy the forum as a package and your options to have certain elements changed were that limited. As you might have guessed, I don't know much about the whole subject. The site is running smoothly for me and I'm not experiencing any of the troubles others have reported like being unable to log into my account, so it looks like the developers did a good job on a technical level.

Maybe I misread, but the way I understood Endeavor's reply was that view counts on pictures were "also removed", as in they are not visible anymore just like the views on threads? I'm using the site on mobile if that helps, and I simply can't find them anywhere. Maybe I've just overlooked them somehow, but they shouldn't be that well hidden right?

The search term was 'box' by the way, because it's basically the only distinctive word I can remember from the story. Would be cool if you can fix that but if it's a limitation of the query function then I guess it can't be helped.

Anyway, thanks for the quick reply!

 

[TMF Jeff]

"Box" is going to be too short a word, but there's no way around that like I said. All forums, that I'm aware of, use something called MYSQL for their database management, and MYSQL doesn't allow search queries of 3 characters or less. I don't know why that is.

Regarding views - when I look at a forum, I see two numbers next to every thread: replies and views. Which to the best of my recollection is the same way it worked on the old forum? Are you looking somewhere else?

 

[His Divine Shadow]

With respect to views, it looks like the mobile style does not show them. They had to make a choice as to how to use limited real estate and likely chose to not show those. We could probably pursue a theme that has them (the data element is there, just not visible) or edit it in the mobile template if that is something folks really want to see.

With respect to the search question, it is not technically impossible to search for 3, 2, or even 1 character but computationally it is a mess. Imagine searching for "in" and how many things that will find. Just the sentence I just wrote has "imagine", "in", "things", and "find". More letters allows for the search function to actually work and not get bogged down. I don't see a way around that one, unfortunately. One workaround is to use Google, which has the computational power to work with shorter terms. For example, enter the following in a Google search:

stories box site:ticklingforum.com

That brings up several stories with "box" in them. The xenforo search function is way better than the awful one in vB (even vB admitted it was bad when asked), but for some cases it just can't do it.

 

[Viewmaster]

In the mobile version it doesn't show the number of times a thread has been viewed. If you swap to the desktop version it does, but after a thousand it shows 1K.

 

[milagros317]

A minor point: the [sub] and [sup] commands no longer work for subscripts and superscripts respectively.
Not a priority, but it would be nice to have them back.