Guild Wars 2

Use the Google search bar

Type the following in the search bar (without any brackets):

• site:[the url of the subforum you want to search in] [your search terms]

Example #1:

You need to search in the subforum “Players Helping Players” for the term “search options”. You want to type this in to the Google search bar:

• site:forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/players search options

This will bring up results that limits your search of “search options” to the specific subforum url.

You can also search user names and/or widen your search to all forums in general.

Example #2:

You need to search for me, “Tom Yzf”, but are not sure what subforum I frequent. You want to type the following into the search bar:

• site:forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum Tom Yzf

This should return mostly posts from the dungeon subforum, but also widens the search to all subforums so it will return non-dungeon subforums searchs as well.

Example #3:

You need to search for me in a specific thread of a forum, lets say…. the General Dungeon Discussion Thread, a dungeon subforum favorite. Type in this:

• site:forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons/General-Dungeon-Discussion-Thread-Part-2 Tom Yzf

There you go! Instant gratification.

Hopefully this helps.

You can of course apply this search technique for any other website.

How very… useful…

The irony of this post is that once it falls off the front page, you would need to use the above search method to even find this post. Essentially a chicken-egg situation.

In the meantime, this is a (not so?) subtle bump…

Thanks for the bump. I’m hoping enough people see this so at least it will become more common to give this suggestion to others who encounter problems with the forum’s built-in search tool.

sticky it

Gaile Gray.6029:

[SNIP] We regret that the search engine is not functioning properly right now…

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the search engine ever worked? If so, when did it stop working? I’m not sure that I recall that it ever worked, but I could be mistaken.

In any case, I’m having a difficult time understanding why exactly the forum search engine would be broken for so long and/or be so difficult to fix. Nearly every forum on the internet has a working search engine; it’s not brand-new cutting-edge technology. Honestly, is ANet doing so poorly financially that it cannot afford to have forum tools that work?

We know this kind of problem (abandoned service in production requires maintenance) in our world-wide company, and in my section we deal with it this way:

- choose only contractor companies who are well-established in the market. They take a leading role in the market and are established for years and proved reliability

- no service made by contractors go without long running service contracts that either guaranties proper maintenance by the contractor or compensation in case the service cannot be fixed and has to be rebuilt with the help of a new contractor to uphold production

- open source is ok, if the product has wide community support and needs only minimal customization, or if there is a company who does the customization and gives long running support via service contract

It is not possible to put a service into production where maintenance is not guaranteed for the whole expected lifetime of the service.

I’m sorry, English is not my native language. I meant every service that goes into production MUST have maintenance guaranteed for the whole life time of the service. Usually, this is a service contract. Going live with an important service that has no such maintenance is denied per policy (in our company). I only summarized some of our policies.

Gaile Gray.6029:

[SNIP] 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.

Ah, I see. Thank you for that explanation, Gaile. It’s possible that that has all been explained before and I may have missed it, but until now the only “official” posts I had personally seen on the subject were along the lines of “yeah, we wish it worked, too!”, which always puzzled me. Apologies if it had been explained before. I did a forum search and didn’t find any posts about it (Ha ha, I know, sorry, I just couldn’t resist!). :-)

Anyhoo, while I certainly have a much better understanding now of how the situation developed, I’m still a bit surprised that the issue has been allowed to continue as long as it has, especially with communication being something of an issue as it is. It is good to know that you are investigating other options for the forums, though. I just hope that it isn’t something that is going to persist for another year or so. It is vitally important that I be able to search for all the existing “Mounts” threads as soon as possible. (Gosh, I’m naughty tonight. I beg your forgiveness. And that of the frog. Who might make a cool mount, I’m just sayin’.).

Thanks again for all you do, Gaile. Keep the sweet nectar of information flowing as freely as you can. Fun fact: every time someone from ANet gives us a piece of useful information, an angel kitten gets its rainbow wings.

Gaile Gray.6029:

minbariguy.7504:

Gaile Gray.6029:

[SNIP] We regret that the search engine is not functioning properly right now…

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the search engine ever worked? If so, when did it stop working? I’m not sure that I recall that it ever worked, but I could be mistaken.

In any case, I’m having a difficult time understanding why exactly the forum search engine would be broken for so long and/or be so difficult to fix. Nearly every forum on the internet has a working search engine; it’s not brand-new cutting-edge technology. Honestly, is ANet doing so poorly financially that it cannot afford to have forum tools that work?

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.

My team agrees that it would be great to share the system that is outlined in the OP, and we’re going to figure out a way to do that. It won’t be as simple as “plumbing” the current search window to go to Google — each of us still will need to input the search manually, but it’s better than the current “poke and prod” to find a particular post!

May I recommend setting up a custom search engine like as follows. So that you don’t have to type in site:forum_address all the time. The following is the link I use.
https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=005577824729523617251:2j4s4yjitgy

The following is the link you go to set one up.
https://www.google.com/cse/

Gaile Gray.6029:

[sip]

Well, I had been following the now archieved thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/forum/Search-feature-not-working) about this issue for sometime now and, although I admit I haven’t read the whole of it, it’s the first time I see a reasonable explanation about why it is in this situation. However, I still fail to understand why it has taken so long to find some way to fix a crucial feature, but it’s understandable now. Thanks Gaile for explaining it.

On that old thread I had even given some suggestions about where to start digging up after the bug, but seeing it’s a third party software and none of the devs there knows about it and none of its creators are there to give some support, I can understand how hard it is.

I was even going to open a new thread about this as the old one is now closed, but I’m going to give some suggestions even here for now. To avoid mistakes, confusion and frustrations, why not removing/hiding the search bar until a solution is provided? Better having no search bar at all than a faulty and misleading feature that causes nothing but frustrations. I believe it would be just a small change on layout and done.

Also, I wanted to take advantage and make a suggestion, not directly related but still linked. What about using a separated system for bugs sub-forum, like a issue tracker, and leaving forums only for discussions, news and stuff? Issue trackers provide more tools for reporting bugs, requesting features and mainly tracking the progress on these things. It makes easier to know what’s a known issue, if it’s even an issue or not, etc.

There are several systems out there that have proved to be very helpful and several big companies use them. The most are easy to implement and use and more powerful than forums (they even have a internal forum system itself). There are paid ones like JIRA, or even open-source ones like Bugzilla, Bugenie and others, just to mention a few.

Gaile Gray.6029:

minbariguy.7504:

Gaile Gray.6029:

[SNIP] We regret that the search engine is not functioning properly right now…

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the search engine ever worked? If so, when did it stop working? I’m not sure that I recall that it ever worked, but I could be mistaken.

In any case, I’m having a difficult time understanding why exactly the forum search engine would be broken for so long and/or be so difficult to fix. Nearly every forum on the internet has a working search engine; it’s not brand-new cutting-edge technology. Honestly, is ANet doing so poorly financially that it cannot afford to have forum tools that work?

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.

My team agrees that it would be great to share the system that is outlined in the OP, and we’re going to figure out a way to do that. It won’t be as simple as “plumbing” the current search window to go to Google — each of us still will need to input the search manually, but it’s better than the current “poke and prod” to find a particular post!

I have to say this is the problem. Anet’s priority should have been to aquire new and fully funtional forum software as soon as the problems with the maker surfaced. I can only assume the decision not to aquire new forum software was made outside of the games’ division and based only on saving money.

I’d just like to add this one here, now that the old thread has been archived:

smiley.1438:

Anyway, i’ve posted a GitHub link to a little greasemonkey script along with a stylesheet in reply to this thread last week which is a temporary fix for the search, using Google’s custom search. However, my post got deleted and i got infracted for it because the moderator thought i posted bad stuff, which clearly wasn’t the case. I hope that’s now sorted out (thanks to Gaile!), so i’ll post it again:

https://gist.github.com/codemasher/654f05a7cdf1c268d404

In order to use this script, you’ll need a google account where you have to create a custom search engine and an API key (links inluded in the script’s comments). For now i assume you know how to use greasemonkey etc. and you know a little Javascript to see that is no malicious stuff at all – i’ll write up some instructions when i got some time on my hands. Enjoy.

There are a few minor bugs and possible enhancements to this script, however, i haven’t had time on my hands to fix it yet. Feel free to use and/or fork it!

I agree on the topic about the forum’s software. I wonder if this (fangamer forum) was so much cheaper than a commercial license of the Invision Power Board (Wildstar forums for example). Why can’t we have nice things?

shadow.6174:

Gaile Gray.6029:

[snip]

To avoid mistakes, confusion and frustrations, why not removing/hiding the search bar until a solution is provided? Better having no search bar at all than a faulty and misleading feature that causes nothing but frustrations. I believe it would be just a small change on layout and done.

Yes! This exactly! Likewise the non-working ‘subscribe’ option. (It IS non-working, isn’kitten Not just me?)

(Haha, I love the profanity filter. I used a common abbreviation for the question “is it not?”)

Elwynd.5798:

Yes! This exactly! Likewise the non-working ‘subscribe’ option. (It IS non-working, isn’kitten Not just me?)

Yeah, I also have noted the Subscribe option seems to do nothing.