Forum Moderator Forum search engine deterioration

craftech wrote on 1/16/2008, 5:38 AM

The search engine on the forum used to pull up lots of useful information with little effort.

Lately, I get the following message more often than not:

"Your search was too broad, please narrow your search options and try again."

Let's take the one I just tried:

I searched the term Mike Crash.

Many of you know we have discussed his Vegas filters for years.
Searching the Vegas Video forum with the "any date" parameter using the term "Mike Crash" produced the following result:

"Your search was too broad, please narrow your search options and try again."

So then I used the search term "Mike Crash + Smart Smoother" and it produced the following result:

"The search returned no results "

So I tried the term "Smart Smoother" and it produced the following result:

"Your search was too broad, please narrow your search options and try again. "

Then I tried the term "video noise reduction" and it produced the following result:

"Your search was too broad, please narrow your search options and try again."

Then I searched the term "noise reduction filter" and narrowed it down to search only the "last 6 months". This time it produced ten results. I changed it to search "any date" and it produced the following result:

"Your search was too broad, please narrow your search options and try again. "

So it won't search beyond 6 months now?????

This problem is becoming more and more frequent and after years of depending upon the archive of posts and the forum search engine to answer MOST of my questions I find I can no longer easily find what I am looking for.

Please set up the search engine the way it used to be set up.

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Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/21/2008, 9:23 AM

I just reported this to the Web Site Support link in the Contact Us link above. Has anyone done this yet?

Yes, I have done it on over four occasions in the past four months, not only about the search, but also the speed.

No one appears to be listening, not only because the forum is still broken, but because I didn't even receive an automated "we hear you" reply from Sony's forum support.

I reluctantly have to come to one of the following conclusions, none of them reassuring:

1. The person assigned to web site maintenance is not competent, and his/her superior hasn't noticed.

2. The person assigned to web site maintenance doesn't care or doesn't take pride in his/her work.

3. There is no person assigned to web site maintenance, and it is a task that only gets done when someone has a few "spare minutes."

4. The software that runs this web site was written by someone no longer with the company, and absolutely no one has any clue how it works, and therefore how to fix it.

5. The company is having internal problems and everyone is more concerned with their own survival and getting out their résumés than they are in doing their daily tasks.

6. The corporate culture places such a low premium on customer support that fixing the web site receives no attention from anyone.

These are admittedly pretty negative, but I am unable to come up with a positive reason for why this forum has been abandoned. I could also point out that almost no one from Sony ever posts here anymore. In the past, I could have backed up that statement by searching for a user name containing the word "Sony" and then reporting the results.

Unfortunately, I can't do that because ... oh, wait, the search for the last six months DID just return a result: someone from Sony HAS responded in the Vegas forum in the past six months, eighteen times. Not exactly a huge amount. However, the last post reported by the search engine was November 29. That's three months without any involvement.

I have no insight into what is actually happening. However, I do know that if the organization included a motivated, energetic, prideful product manager, that the fact that this forum is barely functioning would be a clarion call to action that could not be ignored.

craftech wrote on 2/21/2008, 1:30 PM

John,
The forum administrator did respond around midway up in this thread. He asked for some input which he got, but we never heard back from him nor did they fix it.

So I will persist with this thread. I don't care how long it takes.

John

jrazz wrote on 2/21/2008, 1:45 PM

John,

In the scripting forum, they responded just today under ForumAdmin.
I think your point still stands though. And for what it's worth, the search does need to be fixed.

j razz

johnmeyer wrote on 2/21/2008, 3:57 PM

First, my apologies to the forum administrator. He has responded, but his responses didn't show up in my search because I searched for "Sony", not "ForumAdmin."

Second, I just received an email response to the report I sent to them about the problems discussed in this topic, and it appears that they do have a plan to fix the problem. Since it was a private email, I can't post its contents.

Kennymusicman wrote on 2/21/2008, 4:03 PM

I've just managed a search (gasp) - but it took a few attempts to get it to work.. I'm finding it is sensitive to capitals/lowercase on my search strings, in case that helps anyone short term, until it's eventually improved

fldave wrote on 2/21/2008, 4:52 PM

Yes, I received feedback also. They are aware of the problem and as John said, they have a plan.

craftech wrote on 2/22/2008, 6:55 AM

Great news guys.

Thanks.

I'll keep bumping this up though just to keep it fresh in everyone's mind since we all seem to want this addressed.

John

craftech wrote on 2/23/2008, 5:42 AM

Bump

John

Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/23/2008, 5:52 AM

"They have a plan."

Having one and executing one are two entirely different things.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I should know. I've paved an Interstate system!

Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/25/2008, 4:38 AM

Bump

craftech wrote on 2/26/2008, 6:33 AM

Bump

John

Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/26/2008, 7:12 AM

BUMP

ForumAdmin wrote on 2/27/2008, 4:11 PM

Hi all,

Just popping in to give you a little update on our work.

First off, please know that we do very much value the Vegas community and your evanglism of the product line. Our customer service team often comments on how helpful these forums are to our customers and even to them when they're assiting others.

It's taken longer than we'd like, but improving the forum speed is now our top priority. We've been working on some changes for the last week, and have already rolled out some of the tweaks. There are a couple things you may see from the changes we've made so far.

1. A bit of speed improvement in browsing the Show Topics page, especially as you click the "Older Topics" link.
2. Adding a message may be a bit slower. The "Post Message" button will also be disabled after you click it now - hopefully eliminating the double posting problem.

Once we've rolled out the rest of our changes, we're hoping to see improved speeds in both of these functions. Our internal tests are going well, but we need to see the new functionality working under a full load to verify the fix. We have additional ideas if that doesn't work out.

We're creating a new search index that should greatly improve search response. It's taking a while to parse the full history of this forum, but we hope to roll it out by early next week.

We're also getting some quotes on upgrading software and hardware on our servers.

Okay, that's probably TMI, so back to working on the fixes. I'll post here again when there's something to report.

riredale wrote on 2/27/2008, 5:03 PM

Great news.

As Craftech and others have mentioned, the search function is one of the most useful aspects of this forum. I hope it can be restored to act in a fashion similar to "the good old days" (i.e. last year).

EDIT:
Yes, the "Post message" button greys out after posting once. Yes, it takes a lot longer for the message to post.

craftech wrote on 2/27/2008, 6:23 PM

To Forum Admin:

Thanks for addressing this issue. We really appreciate it.

John

johnmeyer wrote on 2/27/2008, 8:25 PM

Thank you!

I didn't notice the slower posting time because, for me, it has been taking 30-60 seconds to post. I just go to another page and deal with the next message. Because of the forum slowness, I often open 5-10 messages at once, and then "circulate" through them. Usually, by the time I have finished reading 5-10 messages, the next post in the thread in the first message has been retrieved. For the past two months, it usually takes a minimum of 30 seconds from when I click on a message until it appears. Sometimes much longer, occasionally just a few seconds.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 2/28/2008, 4:42 AM

John, that's exactly what I've been doing. Work-arounds, don't ya just love 'em?

rs170a wrote on 2/28/2008, 6:05 AM

Okay, that's probably TMI...

Thanks Forum Admin.
There's no such thing as TMI !!
The more, the better.
My thanks to the team for continuing to work on this problem.
I know I'm not alone when I say that I'm looking forward to the improvemsnts.

Mike

ForumAdmin wrote on 3/4/2008, 11:02 AM

Hi all,

We just pushed several improvements to the "showtopics.asp" page. For the most part, the UI has not changed. The only difference you may notice is that instead of the field and "Go" button we used to have that would let you jump to a message number, you now select to jump to messages from a particular date with the "Select Date" button.

You should see faster page loads when you click into a product forum and when you click the "Older Topics" or "More Recent Topics" links. It's still sluggish at times, but this should be greatly improved when we roll out our search fixes.

We've run into a few delays with the search fixes, but are still hoping to roll out a fix this week.

[UPDATE]: Search improvements are still in progress. We should have them ready early next week. Sorry for the delay, it's taking quite a bit longer than we'd planned.

johnmeyer wrote on 3/4/2008, 12:01 PM

I appreciate all the work you are doing to fix this. For the record, while I have occasionally seen normal load times, I am still seeing (as of 11:51 PST) very slow (20-30 second) page load times, including "page not found." I just got one (page not found) while trying to post (the post button DID grey out). To avoid a double post, I went all the way back to the thread and refreshed and found that my post had not made it through. Fortunately I had copy/pasted my text into Notepad, a habit I have developed because of all the problems with this forum. I pasted that and posted again, and this time it made it.

So, I know you are working hard on the plumbing, but the water flow is still pretty minimal.

craftech wrote on 3/10/2008, 7:45 AM

3/7/08 [UPDATE]: Search improvements are still in progress. We should have them ready early next week. Sorry for the delay, it's taking quite a bit longer than we'd planned.
===================
Thanks,

We're all anxious to see the improvements in the Search engine this week. Appreciate the attention to this important matter.

John

ForumAdmin wrote on 3/14/2008, 4:59 PM

Hi all,

Sorry that this is again later than anticipated. We weren't getting the results we wanted early in the week, so we've changed plans a few times. Our web developer just wrapped up a new search engine that's showing some promise.

Try the new search engine here

Some things to note:
1. You'll notice the search form is simplified. The important functions are still there, but we took away some of the lesser used fields - especially those that made the database hit more intensive.

2. We're still getting sluggish results much of the time. We think this is related to overall database load. We expect the load to be lessened when we get rid of the old search engine, and we are also procuring new hardware for the forum database server and hope to install that next week.

3. The new search engine works off of a seperate index rather than searching our main messages table. This is an important step toward improving speed generally on the forums, but has the unfortunate downside of requiring an indexing process to be run on every new message that's posted. Currently our index is a week or two old, but when we move the new search engine into production we plan to index nightly during low traffic times, and more frequently if we find that it is not too taxing on the forum speed.

4. The way we breakup words is somewhat different on the new search. You may see some differences in the result set than what you got with the old search. Let us know if you see anything that seems wrong - bearing in mind we're not searching the most recent week or two.

That's it for now. Please feel free to post your feedback on this thread or send us a note via this form.

Thanks for your suggestions and patience.

musicvid10 wrote on 3/14/2008, 5:35 PM

Alright, it definitely works faster at this point.

I would still like to see a "Search All Forums" option in the dropdown list. For instance, a search for the word "Reverb" although general, could produce pertinent results in 4 or 5 different forums.

Maybe to prevent overpopulated results from general search terms you could limit the results to the first 200 hits, like other forums do.

Jay Gladwell wrote on 3/14/2008, 9:26 PM

Well, it is faster, but the results leave a GREAT DEAL to be desired.

I typed in "M-Audio 5.1" and most of the hits have nothing in them with either "M-Audio" or "5.1".