ConwayLife.com

Currently the search function of LifeWiki will only provide suggestions if the case the query is typed in (ignoring the first character as well as the contents of namespaces) would completely match that of the suggestions. I find this to be extremely irritating. For example, searching for an unnamed periodic object would require you to uppercase the "P" after the number, otherwise absolutely no potential results will be showcased.

I've tested this behaviour across other wikis and collections thereof: Fandom wikis as well as Bulbapedia are not subject to this problem, however Miraheze is. Ultimately the desired behaviour is the former.

Would it be possible to somehow change LifeWiki such that case sensitivity is not a concern for search queries?

Some visual examples with "Beeh" versus "BEeh":

Minecraft Wiki: both return the same set of suggestions



LifeWiki: the latter returns absolutely nothing

I've looked into it, and this seems like it should be a doable change. Seems like a fairly benign change, but I might as well ask anyway: any objections?

Nathaniel wrote: December 21st, 2021, 9:55 pm I've looked into it, and this seems like it should be a doable change. Seems like a fairly benign change, but I might as well ask anyway: any objections?

This has been a frequent annoyance. Go for it!

This is now done, and some rudimentary testing suggests that it works. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

Related, is it possible to remove hyphen and space sensitivity as well? For example, Air force should go to the Airforce article directly, and both Ak47 reaction and AK47 reaction go to the AK-47 article directly. In this way we can get rid of some redirect pages, I think.

GUYTU6J wrote: December 22nd, 2021, 10:56 pm Related, is it possible to remove hyphen and space sensitivity as well?

This is possible, but much more difficult to set up. The standard way to do this on a wiki is to change the search engine used by MediaWiki to something like Elasticsearch, which requires extra software to be installed on the server. I'll look into it, but I can't make any promises.

Related 2, is it possible to remove stuff like the lower character limit from forum searches? There are a lot of integral search terms that phpBB just throws out because it wrongly declares them unimportant, which gets incredibly frustrating.

muzik wrote: December 22nd, 2021, 11:05 pm Related 2, is it possible to remove stuff like the lower character limit from forum searches?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. This issue has come up quite a few times, and I've never found a good solution. phpBB unfortunately is... less than optimal when it comes to searching.

I have the forum set to currently index all words with at least 2 letters. So, in theory, basically all words *should* show up in search results. However, for some reason that doesn't actually seem to happen in practice.

The only other search backend that I can reasonably switch phpBB to right now has the advantage that it supports exact phrase searches (i.e., you can put things in quotes), but the disadvantage that it has a mandatory word length minimum of 4 letters (so no words with 3 letters or fewer would ever be searchable).

Possibly as a result of this change, search suggestions don't seem to be given at all for namespaces (tested with User).

muzik wrote: December 23rd, 2021, 8:36 pm Possibly as a result of this change, search suggestions don't seem to be given at all for namespaces (tested with User).

Confirmed, and even worse is that no results (not only sugestions) will be provided when searching 14P2, despite the existence of 14P2.1, 14P2.3 and 14P2.4 (where is 14P2.2?)

It looks like upgrading MedaiWiki to the newest version (1.37 from the current 1.33) should fix the namespace issue. Hopefully it'll fix the autocomplete for pages with dots in the name issue too.

However, I'm currently out of town so I can't do an update like that right now. Will aim to do it around January 1 or 2.

Impolite it may be for me to bring this back up, but it's been a few weeks since the start of January and the search functionality is still as broken as it was since my prior report. I presume either the upgrade is still yet to be done or it was unsuccessful in resolving the issue?

muzik wrote: January 20th, 2022, 6:58 am Impolite it may be for me to bring this back up, but it's been a few weeks since the start of January and the search functionality is still as broken as it was since my prior report. I presume either the upgrade is still yet to be done or it was unsuccessful in resolving the issue?

Is it?
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?sear ... fulltext=1

pzq_alex wrote: January 21st, 2022, 4:47 am

muzik wrote: January 20th, 2022, 6:58 am Impolite it may be for me to bring this back up, but it's been a few weeks since the start of January and the search functionality is still as broken as it was since my prior report. I presume either the upgrade is still yet to be done or it was unsuccessful in resolving the issue?

Is it?
https://conwaylife.com/w/index.php?sear ... fulltext=1

It certainly is:

Whoops, sorry about that and thanks for bumping it. I'll aim to do the MW upgrade tonight.

Finally upgrading MW right now. Will edit this post once I'm done.

Edit: Done the upgrade. Announcement here. Unfortunately, the TitleKey extension now seems to not be working at all. I will fiddle with it more soon.