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#1 2008-01-04 15:22:18
- jeremy
- New Member
- Registered: 2008-01-04
- Posts: 2
Why is this forum busted?
I have a problem with the password_protect tag, and I came to the forums for help. First, I checked out the joyent/textdrive forums, which had a link to a forum post here. But the textpattern forum spat out a bad link error.
I went searching, and all the most relevant posts that the search returned threw out the same error. This was incredibly frustrating. I did an author search for the poster of one of the more recent threads, and the search results for this query didn’t return the post in question.
I’d have searched for an explanation, but it seemed like a fool’s game at that point. So I registered just to complain. Lo and behold, once I was logged in and retried the link above, it worked. Which solves my searching problem (I hope), but doesn’t change the fact that I could access 50% of my original search results as an unregistered user and 50% threw up a bad error. There’s nothing, as far as I can see, in the announcements or the help page, that explains the behavior or told me that I needed to register in order to view random posts.
It’s confusing as hell. Frankly, and I say this as a long-time txp user, textpattern is confusing enough as it is. The forums shouldn’t add to it by making it hard to find help.
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
But the textpattern forum spat out a bad link error.
Because the post is in Archieve that is only for registered users, because it holds really old issues. And actually it should return “You don’t have access”-error.
There’s nothing, as far as I can see, in the announcements or the help page, that explains the behavior or told me that I needed to register in order to view random posts.
It’s not by random, it’s by the area/subforum.
Cheers!
Last edited by Gocom (2008-01-04 16:30:12)
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
mary is the resident forum maintainer. i’m sure she’ll come around to either explain or fix any existing issues.
i do agree that some sort of notice should be apparent that not all forum areas can be seen when not logged in. as for search functionality, most forums (like joyent/textdrive forum) won’t even let you search until you’re logged in. maybe that system should be used here to prevent issues like this happening.
as for signing up to the forum purely to complain, that doesn’t exactly elicit a positive response from anyone. please remember that no one here is being paid to do anything. we could easily tell you to shove off with no consequence. but we wont :)
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#4 2008-01-04 17:05:52
- jeremy
- New Member
- Registered: 2008-01-04
- Posts: 2
Re: Why is this forum busted?
It’s not by random, it’s by the area/subforum.
Ah, the pattern emerges. Still, in the absence of anyone telling you that or it being posted in the usual places you’d expect to mention particular forum quirks, it appears pretty random. I sure wasn’t going to trial and error things until I’d figured out what was going on.
Jukka, I appreciate your friendly explanation. Thank you. Steve, you’re right, and I really shouldn’t have let my frustration spill out in my post. I registered (had to actually reregister for some reason) not so much to lambast Mary (sorry, Mary!) as to flag the problem so it can be fixed. These forums have been really helpful in the past (clean urls on subdomains, I’m looking at you), and I wanted outsiders to know that when they went digging and ended up in the archives.
Just to clarify, the error message says “Bad request. The link you followed is incorrect or outdated,” and obviously, that’s not what’s happening. Maybe a better message would be something like, “Oops, you need to login or register (it takes 3 seconds) in order to view this thread. Posts in the following areas/subforums require registration to view: x, y, z.”
I edited this to strip out all my frustrated snark, and again, folks, sorry about that.
Last edited by jeremy (2008-01-04 17:21:51)
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
I find the search here at the moment iffy at best. Searching for the term IE7 brought zero results! It would be good to be able to search within threads too.
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
jstubbs wrote:
I find the search here at the moment iffy at best. Searching for the term IE7 brought zero results! It would be good to be able to search within threads too.
searching within a thread i believe is a limitation of punbb. as for the search being iffy, i tend to agree. i tried searching for ‘team textpattern’ (without quotes) and it brought me zero results. even though i can clearly see it mentioned in this recent post. even tried capitalizing ‘Team Textpattern’ and still no dice.
Last edited by iblastoff (2008-01-04 18:26:40)
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
jeremy wrote: – “Bad request. The link you followed is incorrect or outdated”
Jeremy
fwiw
I occasionally receive the same message when clicking on links contained in forum post notification emails. I’m registered, logged in, and the thread is active, so I’m not sure why it happens. I chalk it up to an occasional glitch. Just thought I’d forewarn you :D
I agree the search is sometimes less than robust.
Mike
Last edited by maverick (2008-01-04 19:50:26)
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
I always just use Google to search the forum. I believe Rob Sable even has a bookmarklet for it.
Shoving is the answer – pusher robot
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
jstubbs wrote:
Searching for the term IE7 brought zero results!
Seachword must contain over three letters. It’s PHP’s limit.
iblastoff wrote:
searching within a thread i believe is a limitation of punbb
If I remember corretly Mary chainged the PunBB’s search to plain database search done with php.
Cheers!
Last edited by Gocom (2008-01-04 21:02:28)
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
searching for “textpattern admin themes” brings up absolutely no results either.
even though its blatantly in the title of this thread i created
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Re: Why is this forum busted?
Can the search here do multiple words? Looking at some of the failed examples here…
Stuart
In a Time of Universal Deceit
Telling the Truth is Revolutionary.
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#12 2008-01-06 04:01:20
- Mary
- Sock Enthusiast
- Registered: 2004-06-27
- Posts: 6,236
Re: Why is this forum busted?
Just to clarify, the error message says “Bad request. The link you followed is incorrect or outdated,” and obviously, that’s not what’s happening. Maybe a better message would be something like, “Oops, you need to login or register (it takes 3 seconds) in order to view this thread. Posts in the following areas/subforums require registration to view: x, y, z.”
punBB gives that as the general notice when it can’t view something, it doesn’t take into account why you can’t, which could be for a few different reasons.
Searching for the term IE7 brought zero results!
The search uses MySQL’s FULLTEXT feature, which, unfortunately, cannot “see” words less than 4 characters. This is mentioned on the search page. I could try and use a LIKE search for these smaller words, but the downside would be you couldn’t get them sorted by relevancy (how often the word appears in a post) and the search could be rather slow.
searching for “textpattern admin themes” brings up absolutely no results either.
Yes, it does, but you have to be searching by topics and not posts, since that phrase is in the topic title, and not within a post.
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