Modern Vespa

I've just pushed the final bits of code to enable a new feature: the ability to search one given topic for a specific set of words. Additionally, you can filter the topic to show just a specific user, with or without a set of search terms.

A couple of caveats:

• It's not perfect. Searches for words that are very common throughout the forum will take a long time to complete, even for very short threads. This shouldn't be the case, but is for reasons I'm too tired to go into and/or re-litigate. Suffice it to say that MySQL/MariaDB can be... kind of stupid about full text searches.
• The search topic function is still more-or-less beta. And "beta" is Greek for "I've been looking at this code for three days and I'm tired of it, so you all can take a turn at testing it and tell me where it fails".
• It's really only useful for very long threads, where you remember that somebody said something that you want to quote or link to or present as evidence at trial.

So give it a shot and see how it works for you.

You can get to the new Search Topic page via a button in the upper right corner of every topic:

It's case sensitive.

It's not.

It subsequently worked for upper and lower but something is borked.

Unsurprising.

(See note about being "beta" )

If you know how you got into that state, I'd be interested to hear it.

Well that got interesting.

It's searching the previously viewed thread.

Nice bug! Any idea how you did it?

Nope.

It'll now find "bug" but not "how".

No matches? Or is this a short word limit (if so should probably tell the user)

edit:gps

"How" is a common word. You can't search for it, even with the regular full-forum search.

EDIT: "not" is probably a common word as well -- though that doesn't explain why it is showing results from a different thread. That's probably a cacheing issue, which is the bane of my existence.

The word you are searching for does not appear in this topic. This new feature only searches the current topic.

And if you're thinking of editing it and immediately searching again, know that there is a slight delay (maybe up to a minute?) before a new post is added to the search index.

Here you go:

tried that (successfully) after you corrected my misunderstanding

The process of indexing a post can sometimes be slow, leading to poor user experience after hitting the submit button. To alleviate that, I do all indexing on a background process, but that background process is doing lots of other things, too -- like sending out any and all automated emails.

Which is all an engineering compromise to hide the fact that indexing and emailing are slow.

Seeing lots of deficiencies in the code that probably explain the wrong-thread behavior znomit is seeing. Now that I know what I'm looking for. I'm currently contemplating how best to remedy those deficiencies.

There are some definite chicken-or-egg paradoxes.

I'm happy with the results and even more happy with the new word.

I've pushed a new version of the Search Topic feature to the server. Might be better.

Also, might be worse.

I'm sure when I wake up tomorrow someone will tell me about it if it's worse.