I used the search feature to aid me in looking at various campaigns, in particular those that interested me, now I have to slog through the entire list to see whats out there. Is there a way to return this feature without slowing down the system?
Also, I have had several very pleasant comments from people about my campaign and would like to see if they are running something to check out their game. Would there be a way to find out what game they are running by their name on the site? Maybe Im missing something.
Slightly off topic, is there anyway to link to the site profiles from the forum profiles? I find it annoying to copy-paste the poster's name into the url string.
It's probably possible, but the forum is a different "beast":http://beast.caboo.se/ from the main site and I hate working on it when I could be working on the main site. ;)
I'll add it to the todo list, as it should be an easy fix.
Search will be coming back (hopefully...) very soon. We'll have to keep an eye on it to see if it behaves and doesn't drag down the server like before.
I was thinking to myself: what exactly are people searching? Keywords or specific entires?
If they are just keywords, maybe just have the search engine search by keywords. You could just add keyword fields to entires, campaigns, and items and keep the ones for NPCs. Then just have the search engine search by keyword, with a logic that suggests things that are close, based on how many times a tag is used globally.
Example:
Search -> warrior
Returns -> Entires with keywords "warrior" (10 entires)
Did you mean? -> Fighter (20 entires)
Granted, I don't know anything about programming search engines, but i have a knack for logic :)
Indexing and searching is a large part of what I do IRL, and it's no easy task. Currently for search on the site we're using a tool called Solr. It provides pretty good text search out of the box without much tweaking.
The keyword idea you suggest is a novel one. I'll have to think about it.
Comments
Also, I have had several very pleasant comments from people about my campaign and would like to see if they are running something to check out their game. Would there be a way to find out what game they are running by their name on the site? Maybe Im missing something.
http://www.obsidianportal.com/profile/micah
So, just put their username in after the /profile and you'll get their page.
As for the search, we're looking into ways of brining it back without crushing the site's performance.
I'll add it to the todo list, as it should be an easy fix.
I was thinking to myself: what exactly are people searching? Keywords or specific entires?
If they are just keywords, maybe just have the search engine search by keywords. You could just add keyword fields to entires, campaigns, and items and keep the ones for NPCs. Then just have the search engine search by keyword, with a logic that suggests things that are close, based on how many times a tag is used globally.
Example:
Search -> warrior
Returns -> Entires with keywords "warrior" (10 entires)
Did you mean? -> Fighter (20 entires)
Granted, I don't know anything about programming search engines, but i have a knack for logic :)
The keyword idea you suggest is a novel one. I'll have to think about it.