[PR2 Bug] Level Search Bugs

[Dexterity]

After playing around with the search tool for a while I noticed that there are a lot of things that you can't search for even if you're typing in the correct information. This makes searching for levels which have these specific issues a lot harder than it needs to be.

Here are a few things that I've noticed the search tool can't do:

1. Words that are 3 characters or less

This is probably the most common problem I've come across when searching for levels, if I try and search for words such as 'Cat' or 'Red' in the search bar nothing will pop up, despite the fact that there are plenty of levels which feature those words (Cat Planet by Pounce, Red Forest by Team-RotomMan). I think it would be pretty helpful to allow 3-letter word searches since there's so many levels with those words that can't be searched.

Spoiler

2. Levels with punctuation

Not as big of a problem but still can be quite tedious nevertheless, when searching for levels with punctuation in quotation marks sometimes the level can't be found at all. I believe that the search bar just focuses on letters and numbers and not punctuation, hence why it can cause this problem. The only time I've had this problem was when searching for TheDraftFormer's levels such as [War]Pi.

Spoiler

3. Searching for numbers in letter form

This is probably the weirdest of them all and I have no idea why this is a problem, but when you are searching for numbers in their letter form you will get no results. The best example I can give for this is with 'Five' by 5uperTrinity. If you search for Five or any other number you will not get any results in the search bar whatsoever.

Spoiler

I guarantee there is probably a few more levels which are unsearchable for different reasons I haven't came across yet, but I'll try and update this thread with any I find.

[Colind]

It'd be a neat idea to implement, nice idea @Dexterity

[bls1999]

I fixed the problem with not being able to search for the literal words for numbers. As it turns out, the engine the database was using for the levels table (MyISAM) had certain words that couldn't be searched (AKA "stopwords"), so I changed it to a different one (InnoDB). A full list of stopwords for both engines is here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/...words.html.

By changing to InnoDB, the minimum character threshold was automatically lowered to 3 (instead of 4) for searches. That means that concern #1 in OP was fixed as a result of the fix for #3.

Concern #2 is proving to be a bit more difficult to fix. I can change the search mode to natural language from boolean which will fix it, but operators like quotation marks (for literal matches), minus signs (to exclude words), etc. won't work anymore. The next question, though: do we care? Or rather, which do we care about preserving more?

Thanks for outlining all the problems with the search function, @Dexterity! This was a long-overdue change.

Edit: It looks like quotation marks still work, which is enough for me. I'm gonna call concern #2 fixed.

Edit #2: Okay, it seems like I have some work to do on the sorting. Also, title searches seem to be significantly slower now. I'll work on this a bit more tonight.

[Camer the Dragon]

Concern #2 is proving to be a bit more difficult to fix. I can change the search mode to natural language from boolean which will fix it, but operators like quotation marks (for literal matches), minus signs (to exclude words), etc. won't work anymore. The next question, though: do we care? Or rather, which do we care about preserving more?

Is there are way to have both? (like with a toggle button)

[Dexterity]

I think the [War]Pi level was a bad example since both of the words are 2-3 letters long, but pretty much what I wanted to imply is that when you put punctuation in quotation marks then they won’t be detected in the search bar. I think this week’s artifact level is a good example since you can’t search the ‘’ due to this reason.

[bls1999]

Just made some edits to the search procedure and it should be a bit faster now.

I think the [War]Pi level was a bad example since both of the words are 2-3 letters long, but pretty much what I wanted to imply is that when you put punctuation in quotation marks then they won’t be detected in the search bar. I think this week’s artifact level is a good example since you can’t search the ‘’ due to this reason.

So, the newest search method includes the symbols but doesn't exclude results without the symbols. I may have to do a bit more research to figure out how to get it to work like this. If this is the best it can be, I personally am happier with this than what we had before.

[Colind]

@bls1999 if it isn't too much to ask for, show how to use the new method via on the search bar either by instructions or a video, thank you.

[bls1999]

@bls1999 if it isn't too much to ask for, show how to use the new method via on the search bar either by instructions or a video, thank you.

Same as the last one, except you can't use advanced operators. Quotation marks still work like normal.