Will forums ever have a good search function?
No.
The problem is deep within the technology behind the forum structure itself. Yes, we had a search engine in the beginning, but it was broken by our forum contractor in the course of working on other things. We no longer have a relationship with that contractor or his company, and someone else is not able to step into the system and fix the search engine because (1) our programmers are tasked with other essential work, (2) the forums run on a web framework with which most of our programmers are not familiar and (3) we’re investigating other options for forums and it would not be prudent to pour money into hiring someone to fix this as a short-term solution.
Though Anet (un)official reddit forum has search. Anet devs post there. 
But if insist on search the official forum I use this page some person made that make google search for each part of forum.
http://www.palingenesis.webspace.virginmedia.com/Tim/GW2/GW2ForumSearch/GW2ForumSearch.html
;)
(edited by Qugi.2653)
No.
The problem is deep within the technology behind the forum structure itself. Yes, we had a search engine in the beginning, but it was broken by our forum contractor in the course of working on other things. We no longer have a relationship with that contractor or his company, and someone else is not able to step into the system and fix the search engine because (1) our programmers are tasked with other essential work, (2) the forums run on a web framework with which most of our programmers are not familiar and (3) we’re investigating other options for forums and it would not be prudent to pour money into hiring someone to fix this as a short-term solution.
Though Anet (un)official reddit forum has search. Anet devs post there.
But if insist on search the official forum I use this page some person made that make google search for each part of forum.
http://www.palingenesis.webspace.virginmedia.com/Tim/GW2/GW2ForumSearch/GW2ForumSearch.html
Thanks for the link. Works great an I’ll save it. A shame anet didn’t get somebody in house to handle all their web coding
No.
The problem is deep within the technology behind the forum structure itself. Yes, we had a search engine in the beginning, but it was broken by our forum contractor in the course of working on other things. We no longer have a relationship with that contractor or his company, and someone else is not able to step into the system and fix the search engine because (1) our programmers are tasked with other essential work, (2) the forums run on a web framework with which most of our programmers are not familiar and (3) we’re investigating other options for forums and it would not be prudent to pour money into hiring someone to fix this as a short-term solution.
Though Anet (un)official reddit forum has search. Anet devs post there.
But if insist on search the official forum I use this page some person made that make google search for each part of forum.
http://www.palingenesis.webspace.virginmedia.com/Tim/GW2/GW2ForumSearch/GW2ForumSearch.html
Thanks for the link. Works great an I’ll save it. A shame anet didn’t get somebody in house to handle all their web coding
My experience of web ‘developers’ is that 99.9% wouldn’t have clue how to construct something like a forum system, most barely have a decent grasp of HTML and PHP/Python/whateverisflavorofthemonth.
A shame anet didn’t get somebody in house to handle all their web coding
Oh no, it probably would have been worse (based on the in-game web pages we’ve seen).
Incidentally, google (or really any major search engine) works better than all but a few search tools built into existing forums. For google, use:
site:forum-en.guildwars2.com inurl:forum “forum search”
(and replace what’s in the quotes)
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