Hi guys, I tried this on the forums and on gentoo-user - but I think it just got missed - a few people agreed - no one disagreed, so I post it here, where it won't be missed in the hopes that you actually do agree with me, that this is the right course of action for the forum search problem. I guess a lot of you already know that the search function in phpBB doesn't really work very well. Search for nsteg f.ex. - and you won't get hits on several hints that are in there - and it's also full of stop words, that mean you can't search on those - that sometimes would give many, but good hits. All this could be resolved easily, by inserting some rewite rules in apache and an output-filter in php (or apache - it too has modules/features for this kinda stuff) which simply rewrites urls like: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=0d48ecb4e79d41ac653661d849983ec6 to http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum.php/f/14 and for gods sake - put sid in a cookie - and besides why should the sid be necessary for not logged in users? All this has been done in PostNuke, and I'd gladly do the setup in apache/php for the forums - so that everyone who uses google, also can find all the GREAT help there is to find in the Gentoo Forum. I have many times found answers to hard problems in the gentoo forums, which werent' available on google - and I'm sorry to see that so many Linux users don't find the gentoo forums - or just don't find the answer on the forums, due to the bad search function in phpBB. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
one more vote for forum search..
I talked to klieber about this - and he asked me to write something up (incl. the code to do it). I did - here http://vsen.dk/simpleurls but he hasn't returned to me. I'd even volunteer to setup the server to do this myself - no problem (if I had a login :) It would be very valuable to have google index this forum - too much Linux and Gentoo specific knowledge goes lost, because the search doesn't work.
Has there been any progress on this? The search in the forums is really bad.
Nope - none. Status is still what it was the last time - I even offered to implement it (as you can see from my simpleurls url - its quite simple to do) - but I have heard nothing about this issue :(
I can't see any connection between the way URLs are refererred to from browsers and phpBB's search function... And, BTW, google is indexing forums.gentoo.org (maybe wasn't before...)
Yes - Google now indexes the site - it didn't when this bug was written :)
