New search functionality
Posts: 43
Visited by: 121 users
I just pushed a little update to the site search.
It's not the full-blown autocomplete with images and all, that I'm envisioning, but while working on these controls, I got to a conveniently working state. So I figured, I'd just push it and get some feedback.
The site search box will now autocomplete band, album, and user names as well as genres, and lead directly to the respective result if autocompletion is used. You will only be sent to the usual old search pages when you search for something that doesn't autocomplete or something that autocompletion won't find (like words not at the beginning of album or band names).
It will also remember your last used search selection for a while, before returning to "band".
Matching is done via proper collation, so you should find bands like mgla or solstafir with whatever you have available on your keyboard. For bands with more esoteric names like ██████, it will also match the also known as field.
And since that was by far the most frequent thing I was asked since taking over: yes, it will match be'lakor as well.
Please play around with it at your own convenience and post your feedback here, if you have any
It's not the full-blown autocomplete with images and all, that I'm envisioning, but while working on these controls, I got to a conveniently working state. So I figured, I'd just push it and get some feedback.
The site search box will now autocomplete band, album, and user names as well as genres, and lead directly to the respective result if autocompletion is used. You will only be sent to the usual old search pages when you search for something that doesn't autocomplete or something that autocompletion won't find (like words not at the beginning of album or band names).
It will also remember your last used search selection for a while, before returning to "band".
Matching is done via proper collation, so you should find bands like mgla or solstafir with whatever you have available on your keyboard. For bands with more esoteric names like ██████, it will also match the also known as field.
And since that was by far the most frequent thing I was asked since taking over: yes, it will match be'lakor as well.
Please play around with it at your own convenience and post your feedback here, if you have any
| Starvynth i c deaf people Staff Posts: 3167  |
Written by corrupt on 09.03.2024 at 22:06 I was a little reluctant about this approach at first, because since your update from January last year, the technical need to use multiple spellings has been eliminated for quite a few bands. Many band profiles simply looked "cleaner" without any alternative spellings, and I really liked that. But of course you're absolutely right: as long as the option of working with aliases is there, we can easily use that feauture for the sake of fine-tuning search results. I've already adjusted a few of the band names in this regard and I'm more than satisfied with the outcome. Written by corrupt on 09.03.2024 at 16:16 I agree. “Releases” just sounds much more appropriate.
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3537  |
Written by Starvynth on 10.03.2024 at 09:45 I can easily introduce an invisible field to band profiles that is not an a.k.a but simply a helper for autocompletion. That is not uncommon actually, usually for sorting and such. Written by Starvynth on 10.03.2024 at 09:45 I'm not sure about that anymore. Imagine someone coming to the site for the first time. They would immediately known what "album" means, but "releases" could be anything from our own output to that of bands. At any rate it is less specific to what is actually searched. I'm still open to rename "albums", but maybe we can find something that is more descriptive and still allows for all formats to make semantic sense.
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| Redel Moderator Posts: 2250  |
Written by corrupt on 10.03.2024 at 15:24 I agree. How about "album/releases"? It may appear a bit long at first. But when you think about it, there is a bit of space in the search bar -- even in the mobile version on my Android. And most of this space should in the vast majority of cases not be used since people will just type a few letters and then pick a result from the drop down.
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| Zap Posts: 3579  |
Super late to the party as usual but love the new search suggestion functionality. Great work!
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3537 |
The search bar now has buttons to copy both links to results as well as bbcode tags for forum posts. Having band and album tags easily available will make writing stuff like articles, reviews, news posts etc.. easier where many bands or albums need to be linked. This will also make these tags easily available to mobile users. And since people keep asking what I mean, when I post updates, here's a gif for you  
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| DarkWingedSoul Posts: 1383  |
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| Bad English Tage Westerlund Posts: 62014  |
That is awesome, will try from pc in a weekend, can be cool and easy do datebase edits. Looks cool.
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die"  I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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| Ansercanagicus endangered bird Posts: 581  |
That's a great functionnality! the only flaw I see would be someone writing a long review with a lot of band tags, since it's the id of the band on display and not its name, it can become difficult to read. But it is super minor, they could remember the id while writing the review I think
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3537 |
Written by Ansercanagicus on 30.04.2024 at 22:48 Well, the ID is the only truly reliable datum, unfortunately. Anything else will go through matching and could lead to unexpected results.
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| Auntie Sahar Drone Empress Posts: 5989  |
This will definitely save time on the more long - winded publications. Good site tweak, mang!
---- I am the Magician and the Exorcist. I am the axle of the wheel, and the cube in the circle. “Come unto me” is a foolish word: for it is I that go. ~ II. VII
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3537 |
Update: Copying to clipboard on iOS seems to be its own science, so I deactivated that feature on iOS until I can figure out what Tim Apple wants me to do there. Regarding tag legibility, I made the following changes: _id tags are now all retired. Luckily we never used them much, so the few forum posts where that would be an issue can be corrected over time. band, user, and album tags now have an id attribute and a label. I'll make a separate post about this, but the tags copied from the search bar follow the new format now which should combine the best of both worlds and fix Ansercanagicus' legibility concerns.
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3537 |
Search suggestions are now larger. Search results in templates can have three lines now and that helps making use of space better with less overflow clipping out of the right side. This also makes the link and tag buttons larger and better clickable. They also have a hover effect now, so you know what you're doing.
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3537 |
Written by corrupt on 01.05.2024 at 15:15 That restriction is gone as of today. I know more about how pointer and touch events work in mobile Safari now than is probably healthy and also how Apple thinks clipboard access should work. But the bottom line is, action buttons on search suggestions now work consistently across all platforms. And for the first time that even includes iPads with pointer input devices like the touchpad on a Magic Keyboard connected.
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