Guild Wars 2

Finding information on the forums (and on the game in general) seems to be extremely difficult and is a source of constant frustration for me.

Searching for anything on the forums (such as builds for sPvP) only produces one page of results no matter what you search for, providing extremely limited results. Could the forums be improved to do more thorough searches and not just a single page of results that often only covers only three topics?

Yeah, same for me. It’s a pain to use this tool.
What a shame we cannot have some specific research such as search in title OR in messages OR in title+messages etc …
Also an option to select parts of the forum to look into would be cool

I use this tread to put in evidence the absence of page navigation in a generated results of a search that exceed the capacity of a single page.

why have search if it doesn’t work? the first (and only) page is filled with the same thread over and over obfuscating any actual results it may have produced. useless.

Search seems bugged. Not only does it not find threads that one is searching for (I find them later), it also returns inaccurate results before finishing typing the search query.

Came here just now because I noticed that very same thing.

I see all kinds of frustrated mod posts about how no one can seem to search for a thread before posting. Well of course they can, they just can’t get any results.

I searched tonight for the typical loot bug reports and none of them showed up. I looked at the dates and they all said today, so i looked for links to anything else all I got was a report saying there were 832 results but NO link anywhere.

It’s amazing to me they can let this go one for three months after launch and then complain to the customers that the customers can’t find anything when they do search.

Searched for a thread about this subject got a page of unrelated rubbish, I’ve never used such a bad search engine, I am reduced to trawling through page after page looking for a reference to my problem with bugged storyline.
This needs fixing!

I think the search engine has broken. I was searching in the Game Bugs forum for a thread I had been reading earlier this week, and I kept getting 0 results on any of the key words. So, just to check I typed ‘mesmer’ into search… and came up with only 2 results. It is almost like I isn’t seeing a large chunk of the forum

Search engine has not broken. It has always been utterly bad and inefficient. You don’t even have option to search in posts or in the names of topics, search threads started by X user ….
It needs to be completely revamped.

you can see threads & comments by X user by clicking on their name.

Nop, you can only see posts by the user, not the threads. Same goes for yourself.

I thought I’d necro this thread and ask if any progress has been made about the limited search results issue on the forums?

When I search for something, it might show many dozens, if not hundred’s of possible results, yet you can only view the first page of results – no “NEXT” button.

Just confirming the ‘one page of search results only’ issue.
The search tells me over 1000 occurences of the search term found and presents one page with about 50 results without the option to go to the next page of results.

Ideally, the search should easily offer a “thread subject only” option. I like to see if there’s been any discussion of specific builds before I try out something new, but can’t find a darn thing because it brings up tons of extraneous threads where one of the words I searched for was mentioned once in a reply. Sadly I’m left with using Google or some of the other fan sites for my research, which is sad because I truly think Anet wanted to facilitate those types of discussions here.

Yes this is a huge problem. I can only imagine the Pain your Moderators are going through. As all the duplicate threads are popping up everywhere, because one could not search for “Title Only”, which seems to be the main problem I’m having. I just tried to do a search for “Final Rest” and got only 1 return related to the staff, all the other returns were related to the word “Final”, and not just in the title, through out the whole thread. This leaves a lot to be desired from a search function.

Please fix?
Thanks.

Any update on this?

They are recruiting devs for site/forum, which means they have no team for this or very small team. As a consequence, won’t happen before many months.

KratosAngel.7289:

They are recruiting devs for site/forum, which means they have no team for this or very small team. As a consequence, won’t happen before many months.

I think it’s safe to say that ArenaNet is almost always hiring people – it doesn’t mean though, that they are incapable of handling a core functionality of an official forum. I’m no expert, but I’d call a decent search function pretty much a fundamental part of a forum.

Also, bear in mind that since it’s inception, the search function here has always been very limiting. It works, in that it gives you a number of results it finds, it just doesn’t allow you to browse past the first few results on the the first page.

Perhaps there are something more complex afoot here, but since we’re getting no word from ArenaNet as yet, it’s anyone’s guess. If a staff shortage is at the heart of this particular problem, then I can certainly understand and sympathize with that … however, somehow I find it unlikely. Just IMHO. Again, it’s anyone’s guess.

Yeah it’s true but I think their team is really too small. Just take a look at the forum updates, there have been few.
When you look at it … 6 months and still completely bugged search, suscribe not working, impossible to “mark all read”, RSS not working, the “wrong link” when there’s a ‘;’ ….
The only “big” update was to fix broken links on the forum, going to blank pages.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming them, I just think that their team is too small to take care of such things at the moment. Those features are basics of premade forums (like phpbb) so I don’t think it’s a matter of complexity, unless I’m missing something.

Maybe they need to look into migrating to a pbpbb forum then?

Okay, so another 2 months later. I’m just checking in to see if there’s any progress on this. The forum search function still only returns one page of results, even though there are more (as indicated on the # of posts found).

Fortunately, Google indexes these forums, so I just use it with the site: parameter. You can’t easily limit the search to a particular forum, but it’s much easier to find relevant posts.

I have issues with the ‘search’ function, as well. Besides not be able to access the results past the first page, I would like to suggest a search feature in Dev posts. Often users come on the forums with questions that Devs have answered in the various sub-forums. But in order to paste their reply, I need to look back through pages and pages of Dev posts to find the relevant post, IF I don’t give up, entirely. Please add more search functions to the forum. Thank you.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

-snip- The search results page now has page numbers. -snip-

Thank you, so much for this.

It appears that any search I enter that contains more than 3 characters returns “0 results found”. Anything with less than 3 characters just shows me the forum thread list (i.e. it doesn’t actually search anything).