Now we're saving a vampire from vampires. I got two words for that -- Nuh and uh.

Gunn ,'Underneath'


Buffistas Building a Better Board  

Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.

To-do list


Jesse - Jun 19, 2003 3:59:33 pm PDT #4181 of 10000
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.

For search, would it be worthwhile to set something that quits the search if it's going to have more than, say, 100 results? Or something? t /ignorant unhelpfulness


§ ita § - Jun 19, 2003 7:14:11 pm PDT #4182 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

My plan is to have it search in segments of 20 per page.


Rebecca Lizard - Jun 20, 2003 9:45:06 pm PDT #4183 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

My plan is to have it search in segments of 20 per page.

ita, would you still be able to, if you wished, have it display more to a page? For better search-on-page ability?

Especially when you have people searching themselves to see how many posts they made on the entire board.

Ah, well, sometimes... you're searching because you want to read all of the posts your girlfriend made... t slinks off

Er, not really. What I wanted to ask was: was it intentional that we changed our datestamp from EST to PDT, or did something get jumbled around in the move...?


Jon B. - Jun 20, 2003 11:21:44 pm PDT #4184 of 10000
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

The date stamp is determined by where the server lives. HR is in NY, fangeek is in CA.


§ ita § - Jun 21, 2003 6:51:30 am PDT #4185 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

ita, would you still be able to, if you wished, have it display more to a page?

In theory ... I'd like to cap it at 50. The search function is very intensive, and it was what drove server load up and crashed the CPU the first time we went down.

So, like Google and all the other big search engines, not too many.


Michele T. - Jun 21, 2003 7:49:08 am PDT #4186 of 10000
with a gleam in my eye, and an almost airtight alibi

FWIW, it's a rule of thumb with commercial search engines, whether general web ones like Google or site-specific ones, that the number of clickthroughs to each next page of search results declines exponentially. If people don't find what they're looking for on that first page, they tend to refine their search and try again.

The one time I did user testing on search (on a corporate site, so, YMMV), I also found that people didn't as a rule *want* to see a huge number of results -- they got overwhelmed by it. If, as I'm guessing, the average Buffistas search is more like "where was Rio's post about the muffin theory again?" than "I want to see everything this person ever posted," then a smaller number of inital results is going to be a help to the average searcher rather than a hindrance.


bitterchick - Jun 21, 2003 8:35:17 am PDT #4187 of 10000

In theory ... I'd like to cap it at 50.

Um. I'd kind of like it to cap at 50 also.

Yes, even though we tested it here, the search function on a fully operational board is still making me a little nervous.


bon bon - Jun 21, 2003 8:40:14 am PDT #4188 of 10000
It's five thousand for kissing, ten thousand for snuggling... End of list.

Would it, like Google, give you the number of results?


Rebecca Lizard - Jun 21, 2003 11:35:00 am PDT #4189 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

The date stamp is determined by where the server lives. HR is in NY, fangeek is in CA.

Cool. I'd wondered if that were it.


RobertH - Jun 25, 2003 11:17:52 pm PDT #4190 of 10000
Disaffected college student

My new tagline is, if I've counted correctly, precisely 255 characters long. And yet I'm informed that it clocks in at 257. And yet yet, it looks fine in practice.

Are those extra two characters something other than the plaintext, thus making their truncation no problem, or am I tampering with forces I can't begin to understand?