After January 14th's update and a fix I pushed today, search works in new ways.

Previously we used pretty restrictive encoding in our database which meant that things like band or musician names were hard to match during search.
For example. It used to be impossible to find a band like mgla using the search term "mgla" (in ansi characters) unless the band's also known as field contained that spelling.

With the database update we are now able to make use of proper collation, allowing it to match similar characters from different locales.

That means that using "mgla" for both search and band tags will now correctly match mgla. In fact, if you try to quote my post, you'll see that I'm using the tags this way already. We have removed the "mgla" spelling from mgla's profile for you to play around with this. It should work with whatever characters you have on your keyboard, as long as unicode collation rules identify them as similar (like 'l' and 'ł').

Of course, the site being as old as it is, there's almost a guarantee this will break in some way. So we ask you to play around with this and report any findings in the January 2023 update bugs thread.

This is good, I like this update will be easier to search here.

Very nice. Crazy how long the site has been active with that outdated search function. Now if we could only get a "suggestion" list for misspellings, we'll be full-blown 21st century

Written by Troy Killjoy on 28.01.2023 at 16:17
Very nice. Crazy how long the site has been active with that outdated search function. Now if we could only get a "suggestion" list for misspellings, we'll be full-blown 21st century

The search function is due for both a UI/UX, and technology overhaul anyway. As are most other parts of the site. I'm going for low-hanging fruit while testing new stuff right now.

Fair enough; I'm putting the cart before the horse.

I pushed an updated for band tag edge cases where multiple bands have the same name with different spelling.

It is now possible to match both Véhémence and Vehemence. The more precise spelling takes precedence.