[wp-forums] search

Sat Dec 24 08:56:15 GMT 2005

My 2p :)

Acknowledgement - if _I_ think it's a simple question, I want someone to
reply. If they do not, I see the forum regulars as being elitist.
Problem is - am I right about it being simple ?

Searching - I _hate_ phpBB searching (in fact most built-in forum
searches are pretty useless). However, with the people that comes to our
forums:
- the non-searchers. Fairly easy to tell. Good habits should be
encouraged so while I think they should get pointers (and possibly the
result - see below) they also need pointing to a 'How to search' post.
We need one. Not a sticky maybe, but something we can point people at.

(the see below bit: If all we did was tell people to search or refer
them to old answers the forums would look like crap. It would turn into
Link City. For that reason, I certainly feel that it is worth spelling
out answers to problems sometimes. For instance: the ob_gzip_handler (or
something close) has popped up a couple of times. I referred one person
to Mark's post at Weblogtoolscollection. They came back at me with
"That's for 1.2 so does it work ?" Now the answer is Yes of course so I
should have clarified that - and with the release of 2.0 we are going to
get more of these. It's not going to hurt us to spell out a few is it ?
And that also makes searching _easier_ for people.)

- the "I have searched and found nothing" brigade. I find that they have
used the forum search and maybe also used the wrong terms. There are
also people for who english is not their language - and we should be
very careful about that. One user - Hoshi - posts for help and on a
couple of occasions I saw a 'search' link. Completely inappropriate for
that person. I think we need to explain the terms and in some cases,
just give the answer.

- the "I'm lazy" lot. I think these are possible to figure out and we
each have our own way of dealing with them.

And the ones that cannot search are the likes that post with some
strange setup, and even stranger problem and they try to look geek by
using lot of techtalk.

I don't think there IS going to be a decent way to tackle this and it
will always irritate us but then we maybe irritate those in other forums
where we post for help. Just the way it is :)

P.

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