[Gamingforce]

This is a direct paste from my board:

Closely following the tracks of the ChocoJournal 2.70 released a couple of days ago, ChocoJournal's been updated to version 2.75 with a major feature update! I've realized that other than the 10 Latest Entries listing on the main page, it's hard for less known members to get journal recognition. I was browsing through old entries and noticed that there are a lot of great journals that get little traffic. So I thought, what can I do to allow people to discover new journals? I came up with a bunch of ideas and put it under a new feature called ChocoJournal Discovery!

Changes From Version 2.70 (2.70 -> 2.75)

[ New Feature ]
ChocoJournal Discovery is a collection of (currently) 3 tools that allow you to discover new journals. It can be accessed by the graphic on the main Journal page.



Discover By Keywords is a natural language search engine that searches through tens of thousands of journal entries and then ranks the results in real time by relevancy scores. Because it is natural language and not exact phrase matching, you can type stuff like "I love going to to the beach in the summer." and it will bring journals that most match that sentence. Explaining how it works exactly is pretty complex, but the algorithm that matches your query works pretty well. How do I know? I did a search for "masturbate" and Jessykin's journal appears as the first result with her relevancy score of 32(much higher than second place which has 6) . Use this to find new journals by typing in stuff of similar interest. Maybe you'll find a few new journals and make a few new buddies!



The similar music interests feature is much simpler in that it looks only in the stuff entered into the "Now Playing" section to find people who like the bands / type of music you do. It's not going to solve world peace, but having one thing in common is better than having nothing in common. The search engine automatically strips out "the" out of any band name and does exact phrase partial matching. Type use into the engine will match stuff like Muse and Fuse. Journals that have the highest number of entries that match your query will be listed on top.



The Active Journals feature lists the 20 most active journals. Active being, the amount of comments a journal has received in the past 24 hours. It's amazing from a technical look because it gets the entire list with just one query to the database server. If you know any SQL, here's the query that I'm using to get this information:

SELECT journal.userid,user.username,COUNT(journaldiscussion.commentid) AS count FROM journal LEFT JOIN journaldiscussion USING (entryid) LEFT JOIN user ON (journal.userid=user.userid) WHERE journaldiscussion.dateline > (UNIX_TIMESTAMP() - (86400 * $dayrange)) GROUP BY journal.userid ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 20

It's amazing how flexible database servers are, but most of you are probably falling asleep by all this technical garbage. The entire goal of this new feature is to help people find new journals and ultimately, new buddies. I think the keyword feature is more real than something like Match.com because it looks through content that you've written about yourself, not some static profile that you decide to come up with on any given day. Let me know if there are any other discovery methods I can add to the discover page or if there is any way I can optimise these results.

[ Feature Update ]
The comment and entry search engines now link directly to single posts rather than the entire page.

[ Bug Fix ]
Fixed a bug in the comment search engine that resulted in occasional duplicate search results.