How to Use Forum Search Effectively (Avoid Errors)

[lordsmurf]

Our site has run great for the past few years, since we left freebie forum garbage behind us. Leaving free junk gave us the ability to backup site forum database, have searches, etc. But our site is now quite sizable.

Even though we've migrated to a SQL database to handle the higher data volume, the ASP code driving this site is not powerful enough to search the nearly 50,000 posts we now have. This code was never really meant to handle that much data. It's one reason we're planning to upgrade in late 2008 or early 2009, after a good fundraiser.

Now then, to search without errors...

Limit your query. It's as easy as that.
- Search in the "title only" instead of the whole post.
- Search only in the Trading forum. Or only in the Set Creator forum. Or Feedback. Or wherever it would most likely be.
- Search by author (i.e., posts by LORDSMURF).
- Search by date range (only Jan-July 2008).
By limiting the amount of work that has to be processed, the code can execute a search without hitting a processing limit and barfing.

You could consider searching full post text for 6 months at a time, if you need to search whole posts.

EXAMPLE OF GOOD SEARCHING:
Looking for "X-MEN Evolution" on the site?
First try the post titles. Look only in trading forum.
If that fails to bring results, search full posts by spans of 6 months (June-Dec 2005, then Jan-June 2006, then July-Dec 2006, Jan-June 2007, etc).

It takes an extra couple of steps, yes. But for now, that's how you do it. Our next software and hardware is going to support the CPU/RAM cycles needed for searches, as well as be more optimized code. The code we have now is sort of fat.