47 replies to this topic

[MotoFusi]

John Davison- Make a donation or STFU LOL

[MotoFusi]

Jim, I am told Danny is an excellent website guy

[MotoFusi]

I should get a cloud raining money don't you think Jim?

[chris haldeman]

Donations are an item in the "store"

[Johnny D]

I do like manthony121 comment about the "no results" it should say somewhere you need more than 3 letters in your search.

 

Nobody told me, I just figured it out after a while.

J~

[Jim Drago]

I'm sure Drago was just being playful with his comment, but I didn't want him to think I was calling the forum itself "crappy".  I find this forum very useful, and the people who post here very friendly and helpful.  I have sent an email to Invision, pointing out the problem.  Hopefully they will correct it.  I like the suggestion about using the site: option in Google; I didn't know about that trick.  However, it's a bit of a kludge.  If you are going to have a Search box on your web site, it should work the way you would expect.

half playful  

Donate button is below the active threads box as well

[MotoFusi]

I just did a search for a DIY tire rack for my new trailer. Instant gratification! Took members advise and ordered up on the supplied link. Fantastic!!!!

 

Jim your search engine sucks.........Not

[manthony121]

There!  I just donated $50 for the upkeep of this wonderful web site with the crappy search engine that returns a normal looking, but incorrect, result when it encounters a user input error, but no doubt does a wonderful job of searching when the user input is valid.  NOW can I continue to whine?  I need an outlet for my frustrations, and my dog will bite me if I try to take them out on her.

[MotoFusi]

Try masturbation. I would say sex but doubtful with the whiney problem you have a willing partner and your dog is out of the question!

[MotoFusi]

You now can whine all you want. I will of course have to put you on autotuneout LOL

[Danica Davison]

Try masturbation. I would say sex but doubtful with the whiney problem you have a willing partner and your dog is out of the question!

 

hahahaha! He should use the search function for some topical creams for that burn!

[dstevens]

I'm sure Drago was just being playful with his comment, but I didn't want him to think I was calling the forum itself "crappy".  I find this forum very useful, and the people who post here very friendly and helpful.  I have sent an email to Invision, pointing out the problem.  Hopefully they will correct it.  I like the suggestion about using the site: option in Google; I didn't know about that trick.  However, it's a bit of a kludge.  If you are going to have a Search box on your web site, it should work the way you would expect.

 I'm sure that Invision will get right on that.   Over the last decade or so in tens of thousands of deployments they haven't figured it out...

 

I hear you on the interface issues with the error messages and not knowing there is a minimum character amount.  Those are relatively easy fixes.  If you wish to have it behave like Google or Bing it's more complex.  This is a SQL based message board and is not capable of doing that.  The tech used does not support it natively.  That means you have to extend it with that functionality.  That's where the cost/time comes into play.

 

Google does offer a program to extend the functionality but you have to allow them to serve ads to your visitors which in turn sets third party (Google) tracking cookies.  There was a paid program where you could turn off the ads and branding but they ended that option a couple of months back.  Or you could license a Google search appliance for several thousand dollars a month.  Or you could use Apache Solr/Lucene.  That's assuming the hosting account has the capability or the access to the account required to implement the changes.

 

This isn't Facebook.  Even if the donations were to cover the hosting costs there is one thing that they can't cover and that's the time of those involved in the operation of the site.  People support the site because they believe in it and the community.  If your time is in such short supply you can't be bothered with some small workarounds without complaining about it to get a wealth of information at no cost to you, I'm certain there are several here that would gladly take a paid gig as your personal consultant.

[manthony121]

For anyone interested, and many who are not, I just got a reply from Invisionpower.com tech support.  Their answer was to contact the site owner.  So Jim, they think YOU should patch any bugs in their software.  When you're not busy building cars.

[Johnny D]

Isn't the patch to use google ??

 

J~

[manthony121]

A better patch would be:

 

 if len(search_string) < 4: raise InputError(search_string_too_short)

 

How hard was that?

[Tom Sager]

A better patch would be:

 

 if len(search_string) < 4: raise InputError(search_string_too_short)

 

How hard was that?

Wait a minute, you want error messages to make sense?

[SaulSpeedwell]

I just want to make a car (or toaster, or washing machine, or shower faucet) that behaves exactly like all my Silicon Valley "engineered" [sic] products do.  You wake up one morning, all the controls have moved somewhere else - you just want to get to work, but instead you have to get on the Internet to find out how to start the car and turn on the heater.  The dashboard is suddenly gray on white, in the thinnest possible type - because that looked great in a conference room to 25 year olds wearing fake glasses, but sucks for real people doing real work wearing real glasses that are working (potentially outside in sunlight) on something other than crushing animated candy or killing animated pigs with animated birds.  If the car gets wet? Destroyed, buy a new one.  If the car hits RR tracks?  The windshield shatters - buy a new one.  So when you buy your new car, the first thing you do is buy a "Case" for it, so that the car won't break the first time you slam the door too hard.  If the car is more than 2 years old?  Sorry, it can't go over 25 mph.  Every 11 days, it wants to "download" something, presumably so that Russians can't steal your 401k and make your car swerve into oncoming traffic.  (I realize that German cars basically work similarly to what I'm already describing, but I don't own any of those ...)

 

So yeah ... I, too, wish we could all get better products from the crappy electronics, and even crappier, software "engineering" [sic] community!

[manthony121]

So yeah ... I, too, wish we could all get better products from the crappy electronics, and even crappier, software "engineering" [sic] community!

I think this is why this issue irks me so: we live in an age of ever increasing reliance on computers and information technology.  Hence it is extremely important that software be written well, and that good programming practices be scrupulously followed.  If this search function had been written by Drago's grand nephew for his high school computer class, that would be one thing. But this is the product of a company that sells forum software professionally.  When I contacted them about it, their answer was to contact the site owner.  I work in the medical field, where trying to get different computer systems to talk to each other without errors is a huge deal, and lives literally depend on things working well.

 

OK, that's enough whining/ranting for now.  Move along.

[Steve Scheifler]

Offshoring

[SaulSpeedwell]

I think this is why this issue irks me so: we live in an age of ever increasing reliance on computers and information technology.  Hence it is extremely important that software be written well, and that good programming practices be scrupulously followed.  If this search function had been written by Drago's grand nephew for his high school computer class, that would be one thing. But this is the product of a company that sells forum software professionally.  When I contacted them about it, their answer was to contact the site owner.  I work in the medical field, where trying to get different computer systems to talk to each other without errors is a huge deal, and lives literally depend on things working well.

 

OK, that's enough whining/ranting for now.  Move along.

 

Did you have a crusty old professor teach you about the Therac-25 like I did? 

 

The problem, as I see it, is every first world human on the globe is using 100-1000+ computerized "apps" daily, versus how many in, say, 1978?  There simply are not enough good "programmers" (roses by any other name are still roses) to go around.  I have watched the quality of all software-equipped devices go down steadily over time.  President Speedwell would not be providing any financial aid for Icelandic Poetry or Bassoon Performance Degrees (sorry, Oberlin College), but we would be doing everything we could to get as many coding-competent people pumped through highschool, community college, and universities as possible.   

 

So yeah, the search function here sucks.  You know what sucks EVEN MORE?  The iTunes Store search function.  I can literally know the name of the app I am looking for, type it in, and not find it there.  For whatever reason, this is a bigger problem on my iPad than the iPhone.  I have no idea who makes the software for this site, but what is Apple's excuse for sucking so hard on something so fundamental and easy?  Even if Apple isn't doing anything much more important than this website does for humanity , Apple has the money and resources to do it well.  Why don't they?