ConwayLife.com

I found that I couldn't find what I was looking for in forums because it ignores words like "B" or "H" or "G", and also I can't search for a consecutive phrase of words.

Google actually has functionality to search for specific phrases but unfortunately doesn't advertise it very well. You can also restrict the search to a given site or even a subdirectory on that site. Here's an example if you want to search for the phrase "B conduit":

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... CAo&uact=5

I'm genuinely amazed that after 12 years or so phpBB still hasn't gotten around to improving their search engine, but at least there are other ones available.

Ian07 wrote: November 16th, 2019, 9:51 amI'm genuinely amazed that after 12 years or so phpBB still hasn't gotten around to improving their search engine, but at least there are other ones available.

This issue came up a few weeks ago, where it was mentioned that for some reason a Google search couldn't find relevant posts on the Other Cellular Automata board, only the ones in Patterns and Bugs & Errors and maybe General Discussion.

Nathaniel has since submitted a request for Google to index those pages, but as of today a Google search still seems to be missing all the 4c/11 references in OCA. Maybe that will change eventually with enough indexing requests. (?)

Is there a way that a slash character can be considered as part of a word when searching?

For example, if I search for "c/4" the results look for "c" and "4", and complains that they are common words.

Adding single or double quotes doesn't help.

BCNU,
-dbell

dbell wrote: March 25th, 2026, 9:55 pm Is there a way that a slash character can be considered as part of a word when searching?

This is phpBB, which is for general forums which doesn't have that many slashes. Escaping with backslash also doesn't work.

As someone who works in conduits a lot, I can tell you this is very annoying when trying to find a partial to work with.

Yup, we are all constantly annoyed by this and/or have gotten used to the annoyance.

PHPBB forum search behavior isn't likely to magically change any time soon. It used to work sometimes to search via Google specifically for conwaylife.com/forums results as a workaround. But it was never particularly reliable, and I haven't been able to get any results that way recently. From Ian07's message above, it looks like that functionality broke sometime between 2019 and now.

When new names or new naming conventions are needed, it's a very good idea to design terminology so that it's easy to search for. Conduit names like "HF94B" were specifically designed so that if you searched for the systemic name for a candidate new conduit on the forums, and nothing showed up, you could be fairly sure that it was a new discovery.

If someone wants to put together a very detailed proposal to do something radical, like scan all existing message text for strings like "c/4" or anything else that we want to be able to match and then bulk edit all messages to add searchable tags at the bottom of each message -- "cFORWARDSLASH4" or whatever -- then maybe we could think about doing that. Seems like that would be fairly ugly, though. Could be a good use of 1-point font I suppose.

A few days ago, I heard a complaint on Discord about the unsearchability of the forums. After a little experimentation, I realized it could be solved fairly easily, so I wrote a program that fixes it. It’s called PETS (short for phpBB Enhanced Tagging System), and it lets you add and search for invisible tags in posts.
Currently, PETS is released as version 0.1—not because the actual program is unfinished, but because the CGoL tag list is. I’d love to hear what feedback you have to improve it!

squareroot12621 wrote: July 29th, 2026, 3:56 pm A few days ago, I heard a complaint on Discord about the unsearchability of the forums. After a little experimentation, I realized it could be solved fairly easily, so I wrote a program that fixes it. It’s called PETS (short for phpBB Enhanced Tagging System), and it lets you add and search for invisible tags in posts.
Currently, PETS is released as version 0.1—not because the actual program is unfinished, but because the CGoL tag list is. I’d love to hear what feedback you have to improve it!

Cool! I'm adding a tag to this post to test it.
ⵌpetsˍtestingˍtag
EDIT:
It works! I have some questions.
Why does the tag start like this... ...instead of just this? The extra space before the tag text is also unnecessary.
Testing that to see if it actually works:
ⵌpetsˍtestingˍtag2
Edit 2: It does.

An extra feature I would suggest would be to allow users to drag the panel around, since it's sitting right in front of the search bar in the corner.

I6_I6 wrote: July 30th, 2026, 11:21 am …I have some questions.
Why does the tag start like this...

Code: Select all

[size


TAGS size=1]

...instead of just this?

Code: Select all

[size=1]

In the preview window, there's no difference; the TAGS attribute and the extra line breaks just get ignored. I put them in so the tags would be clearly visible in the text box, and they wouldn't be deleted accidentally.

I6_I6 wrote: July 30th, 2026, 11:21 am The extra space before the tag text is also unnecessary.

I thought of adding the extra space (so a really long tag wouldn't drop the last word of the actual text to the next line) before I thought of adding more [size=1] tags.

I6_I6 wrote: July 30th, 2026, 11:21 am An extra feature I would suggest would be to allow users to drag the panel around, since it's sitting right in front of the search bar in the corner.

Good idea. I'll see what I can do to add that.

Edit: PETS now has a ⠿ button that drags the window around.