ConwayLife.com

I tried to search for all posts containing "golly" but it refused to do it saying the word is "too common"! Then I tried a wildcard search "goll*" but that found no matches. Is there a sneaky way to do the search I want or is this just some fundamental limitation/stupidity in phpBB?

Andrew wrote:Is there a sneaky way to do the search I want or is this just some fundamental limitation/stupidity in phpBB?

I'd vote for stupidity, but I got "*oll*" to turn up lots of "Golly"s as well as plenty of other things. I don't know whose search routine this PHPBB is using, but it isn't case sensitive and lacks a case-sensitive option. The *common* denunciation is almost instantaneous; there must be a list but the administrator probably cannot edit it. Google and Dogpile seem to be able to pick up Golly so PHPBB isn't piggybacking on their search engines.

H. V. McIntosh wrote:The *common* denunciation is almost instantaneous; there must be a list but the administrator probably cannot edit it. Google and Dogpile seem to be able to pick up Golly so PHPBB isn't piggybacking on their search engines.

It considers a word "common" by default if it appears in over 5% of posts. I just now removed that feature but now it seems as though search isn't working at all. I'll keep you updated on its getting fixed status.

Search is now fixed, and words only appear in the "common" list if they appear in more than 25% of posts now; hopefully it will only catch words like "the" and "will" and other random common non-Life-related words now.

Thanks Nathaniel! Searching for "golly" now works.

Google allows searching of specific sites, using the syntax:

golly site:http://www.conwaylife.com/forums/

I find that using Google in this way is better in all respects to the phpBB search.

Macbi wrote:golly site:http://www.conwaylife.com/forums/

That Google search doesn't seem to find anywhere near the same number of posts as a phpBB search. For some reason Google doesn't find any of the numerous posts mentioning Golly in the "Golly scripts" topic in Game of Life > Scripts. Nor does Google find very recent posts.

The highlighting on the following page:

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1027&p=7429&hilit= ... Cell#p7426

was the result of a search. How can it be removed?

Brian Prentice

bprentice wrote:The highlighting on the following page:

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1027&p=7429&hilit= ... Cell#p7426

was the result of a search. How can it be removed?

Just take the "&hilit=Hexagonal+Cell" out of the URL:

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1027&p=7429#p7426