Advanced Search

You may be right about that. It took four attempts today before I got results. Most likely some gremlins in the closet.

tweaks, but no changes huh?

Stan, can you tell me what happens when you attempt to use the advance search--what fields are giving you issues?

Any specific will help. Everytime I use advance search it works for me... maybe I'm just lucky.

Thanks!
-Lee

Hi Lee: Not sure if it's a problem on your end or mine.
It usually works fine, then without warning it stops.
Once it stops working, it won't work again, unless I get off line, then back on line.
I get the message that there are no posts for the name that I have entered, usually my own.

It usually works, although I've experienced a lot of irregularities recently, including right now. The various outcomes are as follows, listed in order of frequency:
* Cnet's "page cannot be found" error.
* The Cnet logo, tabs (cnet.com, reviews, videos, etc), and top advertisement loads, followed by disclaimer/links/copyright, but everything in between is missing.
* "No posts were found that match your search."
* The standard Cnet page (yellow background, side columns, etc) but the white center field is enpty (no text or error messages).

Other times the search will appear to work, but then it will come up with one of the above when you try to go to the next page of results. For me this seems to be more common when the username is made up of multiple words (Stan Chambers, Toni H, etc), but it may just be a coincidence. All of this happens in both Firefox and Internet Explorer (including most recent versions).
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Another thing I've noticed is that if a post's summary includes formatting, it has a very strange effect on the rest of the results. Bear with me, as the issue is fairly strange.

If part of a post's summary contains formatted text (underlined, italicized, or bolded), and the end of the formatted text does not occur within the summary, the formatting continues to "spill over" to all other text on the page. This includes following summaries, the usernames/dates/forum names, and even the "Back to: CNET forums" at the end of the results.

With any luck, clicking here will give the same results I'm seeing. If you scroll down to the post titled "System Restore" you'll see it looks normal. At the end of the summary, where it uses the ellipse to indicate a continuation of the post, a link begins in my post. The underline command is recognized, but since the end formatting command isn't present, all following text on the page is underlined. If it is not showing, let me know and I'll post a few screenshots of the issue.

John

some of these bugs I can't reproduce.

* Cnet's "page cannot be found" error. --Should have been resolved a couple of weeks ago due to some issue with our entire site. Is this specific to the forum search?

* The Cnet logo, tabs (cnet.com, reviews, videos, etc), and top advertisement loads, followed by disclaimer/links/copyright, but everything in between is missing. --this shouldn't be occuring anymore--this was an issue with Akamai (3rd party server who hosts images for us.)

* "No posts were found that match your search." --still working on that one

As far as the spill over formatting of text I've seen this and have reported it to our engineers.

The search will be revisited, but currently our engineers are swamped, but I will make a huge effort for us to improve the experience.

Thanks for the feedback!
-Lee

The "page cannot be found" error became much less frequent a few weeks ago, although I still encountered it every other day or so until late last week. Since then, the problem has been nonesistent. The issue was occurring throughout the site, although it was much more prevalent while using the fearch feature and user profiles. I stopped experiencing the missing content glitch a little over a week ago, but was unaware that the problems had been corrected permenently, so I included them in my post.

I'm glad to know the other two glitches are being worked on, despite the fact that the one is only intermittent and both are fairly insignificant compared to the previous problems. Out of curiosity, could you share what they're working on (bugs or enhancments/new creations)? Since they're swamped, there's gotta be something in the works that we'll be enjoying in the next couple of months. (Be it stability, enhancements, or new additions, sneak peeks are always welcome.)

Thanks,
John

brings up the first 10 posts
clicking 'next' or '2' i get "jonah jones not found"

even searching on post by me.

I've generally found that if there was no text in the body block, it wouldn't find the post by the authors.

It seems that if I put a common word like 'the' in the search body block then the author, I'm more likely to get proper results.

Roger NC

If I put just my name, I get results.

If I put 'the' in the body search, and my name in the author search, I get nothing.

Interesting.

RogerNC

The search is so broken that I haven't asked anyone to please search the forums for prior discussions.

It's a sad loss of capability.

Bob