Some issues with searching (sorting, searching deleted posts and such)

We have now been running our discourse installation for over four years. During that time a lot of cool stuff and good memories were born, including a nickname or two, in-jokes and partially a lingo of our own.

Four years is quite a long time, so it’s inevitable that at some point we’ve set off on a road trip down the memory lane, trying to figure out some of the exact dates stuff was born to have some context, you get the gist of it.

I’ve now bumped into some issues regarding the search, first of which is the fact that you simply can’t search deleted posts. Since you can’t completely destroy deleted posts, why can’t we search them either? I would imagine this type of limbo is exactly the opposite of what little benefits hiding posts would have.

That however, I can live with because I like the idea that there are discourse instances out there that are swelling up with flagged old post gold just waiting to be discovered by future civilizations or sentient, rubbernecking extraterrestrial lifeforms.

Also, trying to find the first occurrence of something seems to fail miserably every time I try it, and looking for context using the date limits apparently has some hidden logic that I’m unaware of, making post dates irrelevant.

The sorting options all feel like they just randomize in different ways how the same, probably unwanted results are shown. The one option that is missing, is to sort the hits by actual post date.

The advanced search feels like flying in “No Man’s Land”, you get all sorts of buttons you can press that gives you the illusion of you doing the flying at first, but in the end just emphasize the feeling of wrestling a railroaded automation which does get you where you want to go.

Now it’s important to say that the fuzziness of Discourses’ search is insanely good. Throwing around a few incomplete words slightly, or even possibly related to each other, and you get what you want within the first five hits? Almost like magic.

So, I guess, my question is, how would I be able to find actual, first occurrence of a word in a discourse forum?

I thought you could in advanced search @sam? Not sure though.

Selecting order by latest isn’t working for you? Oh wait you want the oldest item not the newest one. That’s a bit weirder.

Seems to work OK for me? money before:2013-03-20

The problem is that this kind of search can be used only from the staff members, all the other users will see at least no result. For now we can search between deleted topics appending /latest?status=deleted to the site URL. I would opt instead to make it works from the search panel simply manually adding status:deleted. I don’t know if it’s possible to do such a thing only for posts.

I am not sure we keep deleted posts in the search index, should we even? This means we are bloating all this index for data that is not searched.

in:deleted is a trivial 5 minute change if @tgxworld wants to take it, just not sure how deleted topics and posts interact with the index. Also not 100% sure I want to keep deleted content in the index bloating it.

“order by oldest” is probably the most easily actionable request here but it is .. odd.

확인하지 못한 점 죄송합니다. 아마 우리 모두 공감하시겠지만, 최근 상황이 좀 요동쳤거든요.

처음에는 이상하게 들릴 수 있지만, 실제로는 그렇게 이상한 게 아닙니다 :smiley: 이 문제에 대해 좀 더 명확히 설명해 드리겠습니다.

예를 들어, 우리는 12년 된 취미용 포럼을 BBPress에서 Discourse로 성공적으로 이주했습니다.

12년이라는 기간에는 상당한 양의 토론이 포함되어 있으며, 용어와 표현의 탄생과 소멸은 물론, 더 넓은 맥락에서도 놀라울 정도로 많은 새로운 현상들이 생겨났습니다. 따라서 특정 사항이 처음 언급되었거나 현재와 같은 이름으로 불리기 시작한 시점을 파헤쳐 보고 싶어 하는 사람이 있는 것은 그리 이상한 일이 아닙니다 :point_up: :bulb:

이러한 기능의 새로움 여부와 관계없이, 항목들이 어떤 속성에 의해 특정 순서로 표시되든, 순서를 역전할 수 있어야 한다고 강력히 믿습니다.

다시 특정 단어의 첫 번째 출현 위치를 찾고 있습니다. 하지만 최신 게시글 순으로 정렬했을 때, 표시되는 마지막 게시글이 포럼에서 해당 단어가 처음 등장한 위치가 아니라는 것을 확신하고 있습니다. :thinking:

이것은 해당 단어가 포함된 원래 주제가 상위 노출(bump)되었거나, 해당 주제 내에서 더 나중에 해당 단어가 등장했기 때문일까요?

어느 쪽이든 제가 찾는 것을 찾을 수가 없습니다. :person_shrugging:

이것은 사용자가 실제 검색 기능의 일부로 가져야 하는 내용인가요, 아니면 Data-Explorer를 사용하는 것이 대안이 될 수 있을까요?

이 플러그인은 정말 특별한 경우이므로 꼭 확인해 보겠습니다. Discourse의 내장 검색은 99.9%의 경우에서 놀라울 정도로 잘 작동하지만, 이 경우는 조금 까다롭네요.