Organizing info on WW popsicle at 20:04 on 28 August 2009
Just wondering - as it seems to be a time of change - is there any way at all of setting up a better search system on WW? I have read SO much valuable stuff over the years on just about everything to do with writing and the publishing industry - it would be so helpful to be able to access it, either through a more effective search sytem, or some other way. Perhaps a barrier to this is the fact that thread titles don't always reflect some of the really useful stuff discussed once a thread gets underway, and there's no system of labelling like there is on blogs. So, maybe it wouldn't work.
I don't know. But if it could work that would be truly amazing.
Re: Organizing info on WW GaiusCoffey at 17:30 on 31 August 2009
I think this is possible - and a good idea. On a number of the techie forums that I am a member of, there is the facility to search by either one or both of subject and body.
This is a comparatively trivial thing to achieve in terms of the raw SQL to select data, but given the sheer volume of data in the forum (and the verbose nature of posts by writers in general) it could turn out to be quite slow (I've noticed, for example, that the Flash Fiction group page takes a few seconds to show now that the group size has grown so much with the recent changes).
Hopefully, the recent changes will start to tempt people out of the Private Members and Lounge forums more often as that way it will be possible to filter search results meaningfully by forum as well as by keyword. (Which will reduce the number of records to search, and so greatly speed up search results.)
popsicle