New server online, new features explained, let us know if you like it!

Hi everyone,

After a 24 hour makeover, we have succeeded in going over to our new machine and with some new software that (hopefully) will eliminate most of the troubles that all of us experienced the last couple of months, during the busy hours.

First of all we have deployed the new server, that we have financed partially with the donations for the new hardware and the money we received for the gold,silver and bronze membership. This machine has about twice the power we had previously on our old server, and that was no sissy either .

But the biggest improvement comes from under the hood, we have installed Searchlight from Axivo Inc.

With this product we can optimize the forum. It has great impact on search functionality, but also on how the database is being accessed. Preventing crashing of our system due to crazy demand of you stoners during busy hours. All in all it enables the forum to achieve maximum performance.

A direct benefit of Live Index search Updates is the post content accuracy. Let's presume an user posts a new thread. 2 days later, a moderator reads it and deletes half of post contents. The search index related to that edited post will be updated within few minutes. Without the update, the post will be displayed into search results, even if it does not contain anymore the related keywords previously deleted by moderator. Also there is no time limit on searching anymore.

• In Advanced Search there is an feature like Google. If we type an word, we can see what other user have searched

• When you select some words in an post using cursor,there is one icon appears for quick search in forum.

• Quicksearch

• other new Search-Features

Search Operators

• Phrase search ("")
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are searching for the exact words, in that exact order. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally.
  For example, a search for "George Bush" will miss the posts that refer to "George W Bush"
• Terms you want to alternate (|)
  The query default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator.
  For example, Oscars 2004 | 2005 will give you results about either one of these years, whereas Oscars 2004 2005 will show results that include both years.
• Terms you want to exclude (–)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want posts that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space.
  For example, in the query anti-virus software, the minus sign is used as a hyphen; whereas the query anti-virus -software will search for the words 'anti-virus' but exclude references to 'software'.
• Terms you want your phrase to start with (^)
  Attaching a caret sign immediately before a searched word indicates that you want posts that start with this word to appear in your search results.
  For example, the query ^product will search for posts that start with the words 'Product' or 'Products'.Terms you want your phrase to end with ($)
  Attaching a dollar sign immediately after a searched word indicates that you want posts that end with this word to appear in your search results.
  For example, the query ^product info$ will search for posts that start with the words 'product' and end with 'info'.
• Fill in the blanks (*)
  The star sign, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, the search engine will treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches.
  For example, searching for par* will give you results related to 'parts', 'party', 'paranormal'.
  Note that the * operator can be used in front, end or both front and end of the words you search for.
• Also, the search have embedded the morphological root of the word. That means it is a lot more flexible, related to search results. For example, if I search for "cat", it will return results for "cat" and "cats". If I search for "dogs", it will also return results for "dog" keywords.

All in all very powerful stuff, and we hope you like it, the guys from Axivo and our developer have done a tremendous job. Let us know if you like it (or not!).

SJ

 

That's on hold due to instability for big boards on vb 4.x , that is for later, our main goal was performance and inredible search funtionality, but whenever there will be a more stable vb we will reconsider. Untill than enjoy the speed of this version.

SJ