Forum Search Function

[Ethanagor]

I feel a bit bad for starting a thread just for this, but I don't know where else to put this question. In the conwaylife forums, there is a search bar that can be used within forums or individual threads. However, it doesn't like a lot of search terms. For instance, say I want to find a herschel conduit in the herschel conduit threadwhich can convert a glider into a B-heptomino. If I search "g to b" it tells me that the words are too short, and were ignored. If I search "glider to B heptomino," It tells me that those words are too common, and were ignored. If I search "G->B" it removes the greater-than sign and tells me that the word "g-b" was not found in any posts. How can I get around this, aside from searching manually through the 36 pages of the thread? This makes it seemingly impossible to find such a converter.

[AforAmpere]

I have the same problem when I want to search for say "6c/13" It removes the / and refuses to search.

[Saka]

I am having the same problem too, when I want to search a speed or oscillator by apg prefix. Please fix this, someone!

[dvgrn]

I am having the same problem too, when I want to search a speed or oscillator by apg prefix.

Some of these are very hard to work around with the silly PHP forum search function. My usual alternative is to use Google:

"6c/13" site:www.conwaylife.com/forums

returns one result, at least, and sometimes you can find more by clicking the "show similar results" option.

Recently I've been having trouble with those search results pages locking up, though. Might just be my old laptop and not-so-good Internet connection, I guess -- takes near a minute to show the bottom of the page. Has anyone else started seeing anything like that recently?

[AforAmpere]

Using Google somewhat works, but it doesn't search the OCA part of the forums, I searched 4c/11 as a test, because I know the post containing it in OCA, and it didn't find it.