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search with reply limits.... for low reply poems
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search with reply limits.... for low reply poems |
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Parker Member Elite
since 2000-01-06
Posts 3129ON |
how about adding an option to limit the search or display of poems with a range of replies.... Say we want to search out the low replied poems, and check them out or the high replied poems.. I went back 20 days and noticed alot of poems with 2 or 3 responses. This would make it easier to find them and take a peek to see if you missed some good stuff. Parker |
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| © Copyright 2001 James Haley - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Nicole Senior Member
since 1999-06-23
Posts 1835Florida |
So, something that would allow us to search within a forum, and then narrow it to a certain reply window?  I like that idea! |
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Acies
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 2000-06-07
Posts 7665Twilight Zone |
That would be a good thing  I see no changes, wake up in the morning I ask myself, "Is life worth living or should I blast myself" TUPAC SHAKUR |
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Elizabeth Cor Senior Member
since 2000-10-13
Posts 879Over the river and through the woods |
This is SUCH an excellent idea! Ron, is it possible? |
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Ron
Administrator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-05-19
Posts 8669Michigan, US |
It is a good idea, and just about anything is possible - but not all things are easy. More importantly, not all things are worth the cost involved. Here's an example of the latter. When you post a new topic or a reply, Athena grabs everything you typed (up to about 3000 characters) and adds it to our search index. The search index is just a huge, 40meg file that she uses during the search routines - because the alternative would force her to read every thread in our not inconsiderable database. Adding to a file is easy. Unix knows exactly where the file ends, so Athena can find it quickly and append that post you just made. But what happens if you later edit your post? Does Athena go back to the search index and make changes? No, she doesn't. Because changing something in the middle of the file is a lot different than adding data onto the end of it. To change the middle, Athena would have to read the whole file, find your original entry, change it, then write the whole file to disk again. In essence, we're not just replacing your edited post, but rather replacing the whole file. That's a lot of work for Athena, and just not worth it for the occasional edit. If you wanted to be able to search by number of replies, I would have to add that field to the search index, again to avoid forcing Athena to read every thread in the system. That would mean adding one or two characters times the number of posts in the system - making the file bigger and thereby increasing the work Athena has to do every time she reads that big old file. Okay, that's a cost, but it's a cost we could probably live with. Those one or two bytes, of course, are the digits representing the number of replies. But what happens when someone else replies to the thread? Oh, oh. Now we have the same problem as when you edit a post. To keep the search index current, Athena would have to update the reply count in the search index - which is now in the middle of the file and requires her to rewrite the entire 40meg file. If you think about it, Athena would be writing that huge index file every single time anyone in the system posted a reply. I think our cost just went right through the roof.  |
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Parker Member Elite
since 2000-01-06
Posts 3129ON |
Ron, well what about this... Its appears that the system always knows how many replies are there. Can't you update a smaller database file any time the post gets replied to and use this for input to the search. I suppose that every post has an id number or code and that this database could be updated fairly easily without rewriting the whole file every new reply. Anyway if its too difficult or hard on the resources of the system or requires too much work well i'm sure we can live without it. Parker |
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