Miscellaneous Hacks - vB3.5 15 Most Recent Searches Made By Our Members

vB3.5 15 Most Recent Searches Made By Our Members
Version 1.0.4
(By Boofo)

What does this product do?
This product will display the last 15 searches made by your members on your main site search page at the top. The search words are then linked to those search results. It uses your censor options to make sure nothing bad shows up. The searchee will also be visible, but only to Admins. The search box will only show up when searches have been made. Searches made in your private forums are not shown to members who do not have access to those forums. It is now fully permissions based.

Version Information:
Version 1.0.0 --Initial release
Version 1.0.1 --Fixed error for new sites when the search table was empty.
Version 1.0.2 --Product is now fully self-contained. No more need for a template edit. Also changed the product name.
Version 1.0.3 --Fixed search template from repeating itself on each subsequent search.
Version 1.0.4 --Fixed searchee name being blank on a guest search.

Upgrade Instructions:
1. You MUST un-install the old product before upgrading due to the product name being changed.
1. Go to the "search_forums" template and remove "$last15searches" (sans quotes).
2. Install the product.

Credits:
A big thank you goes out to EvilSL1 for co-authoring the vB3.0 version, on which this hack has been converted.

Installation overview:
----------------------------
Products to install: (1)

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by cudaxtreme

hrmmm ... is there a way to allow guest to search yet not display the top seaches to them?

You could do a conditional in the template.

[cudaxtreme]

Thanks but I'm a total newbie to this,

Could you please advise how can I do this?

[cavorite]

Installed and working great , but I still see members with "Searching Forums" as a location on Who's Online, and no new searches are displayed. Is there any way to know what these people are doing? We have a few that show this status nearly all the time, and I'd like to know what they're looking for (or looking at).

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by cavorite

Installed and working great , but I still see members with "Searching Forums" as a location on Who's Online, and no new searches are displayed. Is there any way to know what these people are doing? We have a few that show this status nearly all the time, and I'd like to know what they're looking for (or looking at).

The search table gets emptied every hour by a cron job.

Do the searches you make show up?

[cavorite]

Originally Posted by Boofo

The search table gets emptied every hour by a cron job.

Do the searches you make show up?

Searches are showing up correctly for me and from other members. I've just edited the cleanup job to extend the time beyond an hour, in case that was having something to do with it. However, I'm looking at the Who's Online right now and seeing members with the "Searching Forums" location, and yet no new searches are showing up in the "Last 15" list.

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by cavorite

Searches are showing up correctly for me and from other members. I've just edited the cleanup job to extend the time beyond an hour, in case that was having something to do with it. However, I'm looking at the Who's Online right now and seeing members with the "Searching Forums" location, and yet no new searches are showing up in the "Last 15" list.

They could be sitting on the search page and not doing anything. That happens a lot. I used to get that all the time on my old forums.

Or if they did a search for a word that wasn't found. That would explain the list being empty.

[cavorite]

I understand. It's just that we've got a "situation" with another forum, and a high percentage of these people that are doing this searching thing are from that forum. Love to know what they're looking at...

(Just in case it is an attempt to load the server with search requests, I do have the time between searches at 90 seconds. Also, we're not seeing high load numbers...)

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by cavorite

I understand. It's just that we've got a "situation" with another forum, and a high percentage of these people that are doing this searching thing are from that forum. Love to know what they're looking at...

(Just in case it is an attempt to load the server with search requests, I do have the time between searches at 90 seconds. Also, we're not seeing high load numbers...)

It sounds like they're either not finding whatever it is they are looking for or they are sitting on thre search page waiting for the time to pass so they can search again.

[CSS59]

how do i remove the usernames so members don't see who serched

[akanevsky]

Perhaps you should store the data for this hack in a separate table (or a datastore). That's because vbulletin's searches expire and get erased after a certain amount of time, and your hack seems to draw info from there.

If you choose to store things in a separate place, it should have fields: userid (left join usertable for username), keywords, dateline, resulttype, resultcount. It would be easier to store this in a datastore because then you can strip everything that's more than x number that you wanna show without any extra queries. Just a suggestion