Guild Wars 2

There is (for me) a new bug ingame. So I wanted to check if the bug was reported by others and try to search it. But the searchfunktion seems bugged, too. I have a bug in the Concordia LS S2 instanz and wanted to search. Tipped “Concordia” and nothing changed, added an blank and the search goes: “No Results”

Holykittenlord, what is this?

For fun I searched for “revenant” in the “HoT Subforum” -> No Results
Seems like no one at the HoT! Subforum is talking about the new class. Ok let us go to the “Revenant Subforum” -> and wow “Found 6 results.” … in the whole subforum of this class only 6! post seems to have the word “revenant” in it. Pls tell me this is a joke?

Ok, maybe the wrong is on my end. I mean I only tipped the word I was searching for, maybe there is a special-secret-must-do-move to get a good result. If so, then pls Anet (or whoever is in charge of the forum) tell me about this mysterium, so i can master the secret arts of forum searches.

It has never worked. Like never eve-ever….

Google search is what I use for most websites, including the GW2 forums; it’s nearly always more efficient, accurate, and gives access to the way-back-machine, when applicable.

site:forum-en.guildwars2.com inurl:forum “findMe”

or e.g.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum-en.guildwars2.com+inurl%3Aforum+%22concordia%22

(you can do the same thing for Bing, Yahoo, etc, if you prefer those search engines)

Frostfang.5109:

It has never worked. Like never eve-ever….

Splendid, I almost died laughing. My game disconnected the X-time today and I have called it a day. But your comment took a really huge chunk of frustration from me, thanks alot

Edit: Thank you too Illconceived Was Na.9781. I will mind your advise the next time, it really looks good. I think it will spare a lot of frustration

Yep—a pos from day1. I believe they have made many excuses and have implied it might get fixed, but they don’t wish to use their $$ to replace the broken/outdated forum software they use.

Forum search has been broken for years now and they know it very well, in fact they are also annoyed by it. A while back a dev explained why it hasn’t been fixed so far (yay I can’t search for it now :P) and recently they made a sticky thread with similar tips as Illconceived Was Na.9781 gave: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Searching-the-Forums

To summarize, from what I recall, the reason is they used a third party software that’s no longer maintained and supported, the software’s creator stopped giving support and then nobody at Anet has been able to fix it by themselves or none have had time or chances to work on it. It would require someone to study the whole software in order to find out what’s wrong and they haven’t had such resources to do so. And it was said that they are seeking for a new system to replace it but they haven’t found one yet.

Frostfang.5109:

It has never worked. Like never eve-ever….

Lol. This. Just this lol. Amazing!

Emmalouise.1763:

Frostfang.5109:

It has never worked. Like never eve-ever….

Lol. This. Just this lol. Amazing!

It’s not in the least surprising. ANet, like many other firms that don’t work on websites directly, hire another company to build their forums. Choose the right contractor, and all is well. Choose poorly, and you can be stuck with forum issues for ages. And it’s all-too-easy to choose the wrong contractor.

Personally, I think the forum does its primary job well: it allows us to communicate with each other and ANet. It lacks important bells and whistles, such as a robust search. However, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost to vet alternatives, overhaul the existing folders, and replace it with a new one.

I believe the main issue with replacing it with a new software is migrating the existent content to the new one. Been there, done that. I know how it can be a pain. And yeah, I agree that it’s achieving its primary objective and at least the forum doesn’t have so much issues atm. Although search could be a major issue, well, it could be a lot worse.

Oh here we go:

Gaile Gray.6029:

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

Gaile Gray.6029:

minbariguy.7504:

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’ve got this bookmarked

https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=005577824729523617251:2j4s4yjitgy