The first thing you ask people to do is a keyword search -- something that should of course be second nature.

Yet your search page

http://www.msfn.org/board/search.html

is NOT nearly as user friendly as it should be.

At a minimum, the required syntax could simply be noted on that page.

Better, have a tick box to Include ALL -- which many might assume, but NOT true.

Best, have text boxes for Any, Include, Exclude, Exact Phrase.

Worse than all the above options is to have to enable scripting to see the syntax required.

Which is what msfn does.

It isn't perfect, but it works well for me. You could also use the Google box at the top of each page.

Worse than all the above options is to have to enable scripting to see the syntax required.

Which is what msfn does.

Not msfn. Its Invision. They developed forum. We cant do anything about it.

Problems with the search function have been mentioned here, here, here, and probably in another dozen threads. This isn't really news to us.

The Google search box works pretty well though, so you might want to check that out as tain has already mentioned.

Like for any search engine, it's a matter of using the right keywords. If the results aren't what you're expecting, then try different ones...

Also, google search works well if you know how to use it. Then again, those who do can already find what they're looking for using plain old google (e.g. by adding bits like site:msfn.org to your query). If Google ain't good enough for the job, I dunno what people can expect us to come up with for a simple forum. If we were that good at that kind of stuff, we'd be starting our own search engine likely.

In any case, it's no worse than for any other forum I've seen (or newsgroups, or ...)

Edited November 12, 200817 yr by crahak

There is a limitation that is not a problem with the Invision software, it's actually a limitation of MySQL. One such example is being limited to 4 characters.

One such example is being limited to 4 characters.

Well, that's a bit of both really. MySQL might have limited full text search abilities, but if we let everyone search for 2 or 3 letter words (which would often be included in 3/4 of the posts), you can already imagine the results I'm sure. Even big search engines like Google disregard "common" words. There's just no practical way to search for such things.

Results are pretty good in most cases. I can count the number of times I couldn't find the post I was looking for (in over 4 years) on one hand...

Search Options Are Pittiful, Any, Include, Exclude, Exact Phrase

Hmmm, the Spell Checker seems to suck also.

(Pssst, that is meant to be funny! )