Improve forum search

Rodeo

Currently the search bar will simply search the entire forum. Searching to see if your question has already been asked is difficult due to a lack of filters/advanced search settings. Can this be improved relatively easily?

I also couldn't find any discussion about this forum vs. the Q&A site. Should we be preferring one over the other? Do the site admins communicate with each other? I like both these sites, but the split might be an overall detriment. What are people's thoughts?

Megalomaniak

@TwistedTwigleg We could try out this one...

https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/sphinxsearch-plugin

TwistedTwigleg

I’m all for improving the searching capability, so long as the plugin works.

@Megalomaniak I’ll test it locally and see if it works. The only thing I’m not sure about is the requirement for Sphinx to be installed to work, I will need to check whether the server has support.

I might also quickly make some edits to the Discord plugin to make the default more performant while I’m making the changes.

Megalomaniak

Cool, yeah that is a potential concern.

TwistedTwigleg

Well, unfortunately it looks like Sphinx isn't available for the server hosting plan we are using. I found this plugin (https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/searchcategory-plugin) that might improve the search a bit, but it is old and I can't get it working with the version of Vanilla we are using.

I am looking into getting it working, or if I cannot get it working then seeing about writing a custom plugin.

Rodeo

Well it sounds like it's not as easy as it might be, but thanks for the prompt response.

TwistedTwigleg

Well, after about an hour of working with the plugin, and eventually deciding to more or less rewrite the entire thing, there is some progress:

Unfortunately, there is no great way to filter by category in the SQL query, but the results can be culled so only discussions within the category are shown. Not ideal, but better than nothing. Maybe there is a way around it, will need to look later.

At least the new plugin is sort of working :smile:

Megalomaniak

Well, cheers mate, it's still better than what we had before, and frankly since we are a publicly readable forum crawling search engines such as google are a way better tool to use, and kind of hard to beat, really.