BoardTracker Search Mod v2 - a full search engine for your board!

BoardTracker Search Mod - Version 2

This search hack replaces the built in vb search with boardtracker search and results are fully integrated with your board. Search results can be threads from your board or all boards or a select group of boards - your choice!

Once installed, search from the search box on any page will pull results from boardtracker and display them within your board. 'Advanced Search' can still link to the existing vb search script or you can disable or restrict access to specific users (ie. admins, mods, paying members etc).

Results can be formated in any way you want with some simple template variables.

Options control panel allows you to switch the boardtracker search mod on or off at any time so you can switch between boardtracker and vb search whenever you want.

The following configuration options/defaults exist:

Switch search on/off

Switch 'safe filter' on/off

Switch global search option on/off

Board ID - you can limit search to just your board, or several boards you choose or ALL boards indexed by boardtracker.

Category ID - you can define a category on boardtracker and searches will only pull results from that category.

Default Sort Order - you can sort results by relevancy or by post date.

Default Search Scope - results can be limited to last day, week, month, year or all time.

Default Search Query - a search term that will be executed whenever the boardtracker search script is called directly with no params. For example you could set it to "site:yourdomain.com blah" and it will display all threads from your board about "blah"

Find Posts By User - replace the search links on user profiles and postbits.

Internal vB Search Allowed Usergroups - specify which usergroups are allowed to still use the built in vb search (search.php) and redirect all others to the bt search (searchbt.php). Leave empty to allow all users to still access search.php


User selections on the search form override the defaults.

The mod is very easy to install and consists of 1 php script to upload, 1 product xml file to install, 1 simple template edit. The xml product file creates one new template, an options panel and a few phrases.

You can see a demo here which has the search set to global so results come from all boards in boardtracker (since there are no actual posts on the demo board to search )

Also check out our topic tagging mod with cool tag clouds here

If your board is not yet indexed by BoardTracker, make sure to submit it!


## New features in version 2..

Search posts by username
Search in specific forums
Search in related forums
Search by boardtracker category
RSS feed and alerts for searches
Global search option
Block or restrict the built in search to specific usergroups
More integration with vb search links (such as from member profile)
More widgets in the control panel to play with


We also have a version for vB3.6 here..
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=123862



updates:
v2.0.1 - fixed typo in one phrase setting
v2.0.2 - fixed bug in searchbt.php affecting some people. To upgrade, just upload the new searchbt.php, no other action required.
v2.0.3 - minor html change in templates - not a required upgrade
v2.0.4 - update to searchbt.php
v2.0.5 - small change to 'stopwords' in search_boardtracker template
v2.0.6 - updated for new BoardTracker 2010. To upgrade, upload searchbt.php, install xml, minor template edits (param names)

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by Kevlar

Is there a way to know when you have indexed all the past posts are are up-to-date?

Yes, just login to your control panel on boardtracker and you will see all the forums listed that we currently index along with number of threads indexed in each as well as total for the board.

In your case I just now added a load of forums that were not previously listed and will start scanning those soon so you will see the counts rising on those.

[Kevlar]

Well I enabled it for the basic search but I left the advanced search active for the time being. I did notice one drawback tho, with BT you are unable to seach specific forums (or did I miss that option)... so it may require keeping the vB advanced search active.

I hope your BT koalas index fast... cause my members will be asking what happened to all our history soon.

[ferrarislave]

Boardtracker, I run a single board, I want to signup for your service; however, I don't see how I can benefit from the mod seeing that vbulletin already does a great job of finding things that our members look for... Sorry to sound ignorant, or otherwise mis-informed, but I don't quite understand the need for this mod if your running a single forum.

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by ferrarislave

Boardtracker, I run a single board, I want to signup for your service; however, I don't see how I can benefit from the mod seeing that vbulletin already does a great job of finding things that our members look for... Sorry to sound ignorant, or otherwise mis-informed, but I don't quite understand the need for this mod if your running a single forum.

Hi ferrarislave
First of all, glad to see you submitted your board into BoardTracker and will soon enjoy being searchable on BoardTracker and found by users of BoardTracker even if you don't use the search mod.

As for the search mod..
Your board has 3300 threads. At that size, the internal search mechanism can still handle that without significant impact on the speed/responsiveness of the board.
However, as your board grows, you will see it getting slower and slower, since the internal search mechanism is not well designed for search, a thing which causes heavy load on the Database server/s and eventually similar or even higher loads on the web servers, which is why you will see many board with search disabled. By the way, this is not VB specific issue. All board software suffer from this. A proper search requires a system built from the ground up to do search and that is what BoardTracker does and even more specifically it is designed and built for searching boards.

And at the same time, the results will start being less relevant, for the same reason - The built in search is not fully suitable for searching in large quantities of data/text.

When you get to that stage, you will most probably see the need for a better search. BoardTracker search mod can answer that need.

To see the performance problem issue and some of it's roots, have a look at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=119263

To see the relevancy problem itself, try this..
Search this board for -< searching large forums >- and order it by relevancy. Do you find the above thread at all? (note: it's titled "How did you solve searching in large forums?").
Now try searching BoardTracker for the same thing: searching large forums
Notice that even without a site limit, the relevant thread comes up among the very first results:
searching large forums
What's more, BoardTracker allows you to use stemming. that means that even if you search for search large forum instead of searching large forums, it will still find the thread.

You can judge the mod maybe by seeing boards.ie's experience, rpg.net's and others. Hopefully we will see some feedback from BimmerForums.com soon if they disable the advanced search and see the full effect of migrating to the search mod on their servers.

I hope it clears things up. Let us know what you think.

[Firestar.chkn]

Any idea when a version for vBulletin 3.6 will be available?

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by Firestar.chkn

Any idea when a version for vBulletin 3.6 will be available?

Right after it is officially released

[heathriel]

I submitted my board weeks ago and still haven't received instructions - http://www.plundertheport.com/forums

Can you please look into this? We're about to go live. Thanks!

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by heathriel

I submitted my board weeks ago and still haven't received instructions - http://www.plundertheport.com/forums

Can you please look into this? We're about to go live. Thanks!

Your forum is not accessible... Trying to access it, we get a request to fill in user/password (.htaccess style). can others confirm?
I think we have emailed you about it. Andway, keep us updated.

[punk23]

Yup, same here

[heathriel]

It should be available now - legal issues kept us from being open until now.

I haven't received any email, though. heather at floodg dot com ?