[Camelot]

No, this isn't another complaint about the speed of search

My suggestion is to fix the order of the forums in the search popup menu.

Human memories work in a relative manner - i.e. item x is above item y. Anyone who's spent any significant time in the forums knows that iMac appears above Internet Software, which is above Mac OS X in the top page of the forums, and all the archives are at the end.

However, when you come to search and want to define which forum to conduct the search in, the forum list popup menu is in a completely different (and illogical?) order. It takes several times longer to find the forum than it should.



Why on earth would 'OS X General - Archive II' be option 3, when 'OS X General - Archive I' is item 28 and the current 'OS X - General Discussion' is way down at 34.

Power Mac is the first forum on the top page, but the tenth item on the search list.

PLEASE reorder the search list to match the order the forums appear on the top page.

[gorgonzola]

Unfortunately, easier said than done (he says as he mashes Infopop into a pulp).

The order is done by the order they were created, not the way they're categorized. WHY anyone would sort it like that I don't know, but it can't be changed at this point, unless there's a fix to the search itself in a "future release." If I changed the forum ID of all the forums to reflect their order, two things would happen: (a) all links to forum threads would break (badbadbad!), and (b) we'd have to reorder them each time we added or removed a forum, meaning that no links to any forum threads would stay working for that long (bad! bad!).

Hopefully it'll be fixed in UBB, but it's nothing we can fix right now. Sorry. That's been bothering me too.

<edit>

Oh yes, but we are planning on upgrading to UBB 6.2.x once it stabilizes a bit and we get our hacks ready (star status, etc), so maybe it's part of the search improvements listed in 6.2's changelog...

[ 03-21-2002: Message edited by: gorgonzola ]

[philzilla]

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
<STRONG>Oh yes, but we are planning on upgrading to UBB 6.2.x once it stabilizes a bit and we get our hacks ready (star status, etc), so maybe it's part of the search improvements listed in 6.2's changelog...</STRONG>

don't forget those bits i told demonhood about for you. took me a bit of searching to find those!

[Camelot]

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
<STRONG>The order is done by the order they were created, not the way they're categorized. WHY anyone would sort it like that I don't know, but it can't be changed at this point, unless there's a fix to the search itself in a "future release." If I changed the forum ID of all the forums to reflect their order, two things would happen: (a) all links to forum threads would break (badbadbad!), and (b) we'd have to reorder them each time we added or removed a forum, meaning that no links to any forum threads would stay working for that long (bad! bad!).
</STRONG>

So why not change the search page to a static page with the forums in the correct order and screw UBB. There's no reason why that page has to be dynamically created from the UBB database.

The only drawback would be that you'd have to manually add new forums to the list each time you added a new forum on the main page but with the frequency with which this happens, that hardly seems like a problem at all.