The search bar is currently useless. If you search for a specific phrase you are greeted by nothing you actually want because it will search for any and all variations of what you type rather than just what you typed. Now, while you can use Google search to look through the forums, it is heavily limited in the functions it can do.
I'm going to list the biggest issues with this in order:
1. It will search inside words for your search terms which is mindbogglingly insane
[image: i.imgur.com]
I shouldn't have to explain why this is unacceptable as I'm supremely confident that the issue with this is self-evident.
2. It individually searches terms rather than the entire phrase, even if you try to use quotes
[image: i.imgur.com]
Why would your actual search not be the first result? If you want to find people talking about making money, the first two results have absolutely nothing to do with your search and the third find is what you actually tried searching for, even if it still isn't what you want. If you search this phrase you get two proper results on the first page, one on the second, then two on the sixth page, one on the seventh page, two on the eighth page, and then one on the ninth page when all those results should have been on the very first page because they were your actual search phrase. Only after all verbatim results are listed should other options be listed.
3. The lack of any advanced ways to narrow your search (exact match, time frame, rating, excluding X, etc)
I want to start this out by saying how frustrating it is that the search topics option is not for topic titles but for the entire OP. This makes it almost impossible to re-find topics since even if you can remember a word in the title you can't actually search specifically for that title word.
For an example, when I first started playing I saw this forum post and thought it was neat but since I was just a noob I figured that I should wait until I was a bit better stats wise before attacking the people listed within it. Now, fast forward a month and I could barely remember what it was called "was it 'leveling targets' or something like 'target list'?" Either way I knew for sure that the topic had "target" in the title so I searched for that using all the options I could on the forums and got this monstrosity and couldn't believe it. I looked at the titles but couldn't find what I was looking for and gave up on the 2nd page because of how horrendous the search results were. If I could have searched the topic titles it would have been the 2nd result on the first page and I would have been fine and dandy.
Now imagine if you were trying to find some comment one of the devs made sometime last year where they mentioned a new update they were working on. You have absolutely no way to ever find it. While you can click the forum post button on the devs profile which gives you 50 pages to look through at most, you have no way to ever sort them. You can't search for "Crimes 2.0" posted specifically by Chedburn[1] sometime between August 2019 and December 2019 so the absolute best you could do is click the forum posts button in Ched's profile and skim through dozens of pages trying to find the post. God forbid if you forgot which dev posted the comment forcing you to go through hundreds, if not thousands, of posts trying to look for something that would've taken you no longer than a minute or two with a proper forum search.
Luckily there are several ways to fix this issue, I will list them in order of difficulty.
1. Code a functional search bar. Who knows, maybe there's a quick and easy code snippet on stack overflow you can use, although that's obviously unlikely.
2. Use another forum solution. Invision Community is generally considered the best forum option, although it does have a subscription model and some features are locked behind more subscription charges (ex. blogs). There are other free/more customizable solutions like phpBB or SMF though.
3. Just use a Google Custom Search Engine. Plenty of sites already use it and it works just fine, it would easily solve most of the search issues but only partially solve point 3 above. This is only a little better than what many people already do which is going to Google to search the forums, but at least it cuts out that step making searches a bit faster.
I'm going to list the biggest issues with this in order:
1. It will search inside words for your search terms which is mindbogglingly insane
[image: i.imgur.com]
![[image: i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/mRIxE23.png){kind=link}
I shouldn't have to explain why this is unacceptable as I'm supremely confident that the issue with this is self-evident.
2. It individually searches terms rather than the entire phrase, even if you try to use quotes
[image: i.imgur.com]
![[image: i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/XBPjqh0.png){kind=link}
Why would your actual search not be the first result? If you want to find people talking about making money, the first two results have absolutely nothing to do with your search and the third find is what you actually tried searching for, even if it still isn't what you want. If you search this phrase you get two proper results on the first page, one on the second, then two on the sixth page, one on the seventh page, two on the eighth page, and then one on the ninth page when all those results should have been on the very first page because they were your actual search phrase. Only after all verbatim results are listed should other options be listed.
3. The lack of any advanced ways to narrow your search (exact match, time frame, rating, excluding X, etc)
I want to start this out by saying how frustrating it is that the search topics option is not for topic titles but for the entire OP. This makes it almost impossible to re-find topics since even if you can remember a word in the title you can't actually search specifically for that title word.
For an example, when I first started playing I saw this forum post and thought it was neat but since I was just a noob I figured that I should wait until I was a bit better stats wise before attacking the people listed within it. Now, fast forward a month and I could barely remember what it was called "was it 'leveling targets' or something like 'target list'?" Either way I knew for sure that the topic had "target" in the title so I searched for that using all the options I could on the forums and got this monstrosity and couldn't believe it. I looked at the titles but couldn't find what I was looking for and gave up on the 2nd page because of how horrendous the search results were. If I could have searched the topic titles it would have been the 2nd result on the first page and I would have been fine and dandy.
Now imagine if you were trying to find some comment one of the devs made sometime last year where they mentioned a new update they were working on. You have absolutely no way to ever find it. While you can click the forum post button on the devs profile which gives you 50 pages to look through at most, you have no way to ever sort them. You can't search for "Crimes 2.0" posted specifically by Chedburn[1] sometime between August 2019 and December 2019 so the absolute best you could do is click the forum posts button in Ched's profile and skim through dozens of pages trying to find the post. God forbid if you forgot which dev posted the comment forcing you to go through hundreds, if not thousands, of posts trying to look for something that would've taken you no longer than a minute or two with a proper forum search.
Luckily there are several ways to fix this issue, I will list them in order of difficulty.
1. Code a functional search bar. Who knows, maybe there's a quick and easy code snippet on stack overflow you can use, although that's obviously unlikely.
2. Use another forum solution. Invision Community is generally considered the best forum option, although it does have a subscription model and some features are locked behind more subscription charges (ex. blogs). There are other free/more customizable solutions like phpBB or SMF though.
3. Just use a Google Custom Search Engine. Plenty of sites already use it and it works just fine, it would easily solve most of the search issues but only partially solve point 3 above. This is only a little better than what many people already do which is going to Google to search the forums, but at least it cuts out that step making searches a bit faster.
Mentions: Chedburn [1] · Trip's "Target Trove"!