Liberal Arts Major
(Universal) Search
When Palm released the Pre in a last desperate effort to avoid bankruptcy, they debuted webOS and, with it, a focus on bringing data together from all sorts of places through Synergy and universal search. RIM recently reiterated this focus through their own implementations of universal search and the feeds application in BB6.
"But Ogor," you may or may not be thinking. "What do phone and tablet operating systems have to do with TFN?" Well, as soon as webOS came into existence I began pondering ways to implement something like that on TFN. Pondering, but not doing, of course, since I'm lazy. TFN could actually make use of something like that, I thought, because the site has a lot of disparate facets: articles, fiction, boards, users, SS, polls, PMs, other stuff that doesn't exist yet.
Well, a few weeks ago I was looking for interesting things to do before September rolled around and I revisited this concept. The implementation I came up with is extremely elementary: it doesn't even search the boards (they still have their own search page) and there's no "advanced search", so it always searches every available category, and so on. And I took the lazy way out and made it print every result but hide the paginated ones, so if you search for, say, "the" the page is going to take quite some time to load. But it's certainly better than what was there before (maybe).
The search function is split into titles and text. Title search includes article/chapter/project titles, poll questions, and usernames. Text search includes article/chapter bodies, project descriptions, poll answers, author profiles, sigs and quotes, and PM bodies (those with links to view_pm.php under "From" are received, those without are sent by you). Both search custom data. The search is done case-insensitively (I think) and it always looks for the complete string.
While I was planning that, I was also looking into some sort of "TFN wiki", an idea I got from LL/ETI. Unfortunately, I don't have access to either the server directly or to PHP 5 (for reasons unknown). But, universal search gave me an idea.
Hubs
Hubs came to mind by way of the island in a stream metaphor: out of the vast possibilities of search terms, only a fraction will be meaningful and known to a site's userbase. Take a cue from wikis, we can make those islands explicit: link them to a search function and allow users to submit information that would appear when the word is searched. I called these islands hubs, and the hubs page functions as an aggregate titles and text search which will also display a sort of landing page whenever a word the corresponds to a hub is searched. Search for TFN and you'll see what I mean.
As far as management is concerned, I basically copied wiki (lazily). Individual hub pages can't be deleted except through the database, but hubs can be collected into groups (as seen in the TFN example) and disambiguated (search flux for an example) - however, only moderators can group or disambiguate, which is a fairly large failure of the system. When hubs are grouped, the subordinate one's (the one that redirects) data is appended to the end of the superior's, and when they're degrouped, the superior's data is copied for the subordinate's - i.e., if you're going to group things and the subordinate's data isn't blank, you should probably go in and edit the superior hub after you're done. Additionally, moderators can revert hub data to an earlier state, and you can provide editorial comments to explain your edits. All moderators (level 41+) have access to these features through the control panel.
To be honest, the code for this is really a mess - this is by far the most alpha-level of things I've done recently. Moderators especially should notice the lack of options and/or logic, since there's very little interconnectedness in the system from that end. But it's there, so you can all go about not using it at your leisure.
That ends this portion of my update schedule. Next I'm going to look into that scum thing I keep talking about, so I wouldn't expect any big news for a few weeks/months. I'll tend to bug fixes and getting all the things I've done recently into pristine beta condition at some unspecified date in the rather distant future.
Editor
On an unrelated note: Did you make the hide spoiler tags less hideous? Because they're totally less hideous now. <_<
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"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
Yes. Although part of the reason I can get away with doing things half-assed is that nobody is going to use this stuff anyway.
Also because I have negative cashflow.
On an unrelated note: Did you make the hide spoiler tags less hideous? Because they're totally less hideous now. <_<
I changed the <> to [] so it would match the "click to show" half. It's not retroactive though.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu