Forum improvement - change to search function

Posted by Nick Gammon on Wed 19 Aug 2009 10:01 PM — 1 posts, 8,158 views.

Australia Forum Administrator #0
A recent post pointed out that the search function may tend to return posts requesting information about a topic, rather than posts that answer the question.

As an example, with dozens of posts asking how to write a "stat roller", the search tended to put those at the top of the list, as the search returned results in descending date order.

Now, the results are ordered in descending "view count" order. The hope here is that the more frequently viewed pages are the ones that answer the question, or are helpful in some way, rather than asking the question again.




Also, now when you do a search it adds the number of posts in the thread to the displayed results, and the count of views, like this:


Triggers across lines
    Sat 24 Apr 2004 07:54 AM (46 posts, 5,757 views)

Stat Roller
    Mon 12 Nov 2001 02:26 AM (27 posts, 5,257 views)


That helps you assess the "usefulness" of particular threads. Probably a thread with more posts will have more discussion, and the more views means it is popular and therefore probably helpful.