During one of the recent BBS upgrades, the default search parameters seem to have changed. IIRC, the defaults used to be:

Search Options: And
Date Range: All Posts

and now they seem to be:

Search Options: Entire Phrase
Date Range: Newer than 1 week

My fear with these options is that new users are going to do a search and not notice the options, and wonder why they're not getting any hits. This actually happened to me at first since the defaults changed at some point.

Don't we want people to by default search all posts, so that something that was discussed a few weeks ago comes up? Furthermore, don't we want a search like "empeg boot logo change software" to be an "and" query unless the user specifically wants to search for that exact phrase? Most search engines use "and" by default and make you actually do something to look for an exact phrase.

Just another suggestion to get people the help they need and help reduce noise. I have officially lost my battle of trying to keep up with the General forum due to the ungodly number of redundant posts lately, and I think changing the default search options might help.

Good suggestion. I'm just pissed off at having to modify these options myself. Or using the back button and finding out they've been cleared... Argh.

I'd also suggest changing the default colour profile to the empeg standard one. I noticed the other day that the new default seems to be a really terrible white scheme. The black-backed mauve/purple "empeg" scheme is so much nicer.

Bruno

During one of the recent BBS upgrades, the default search parameters seem to have changed

Uhhhh, yeah. What he said.

tanstaafl.

Those are actually the defaults for the BBS software itself. Normally, Paul does change them every time he upgrades the software.

However, recently, you may remember the BBS was crashing a whole bunch, right around the time of the last upgrade. One of the things he tried to prevent the crashes was to reduce the database overhead, and one of the ways of reducing the overhead is to reduce the scope of the searches. It was one of his diagnostic steps to leave those settings at the defaults.

I agree that the search screen should default to the largest scope in order to be most useful to new users. Perhaps Paul will decide that it's OK to put it back now that the BBS seems to have settled down?

Yes this shouldn't be a problem. I decided not to use these
settings after the last upgrade as the BBS was already struggling.

Now the server has had a memory upgrade and a few other tweaks I can't see any reason not to change this back - unless of course the performace gets hit again.

Cheers

Paul

As far as I am aware the default settings are set the the empeg colours. There was a problem with this a few weeks ago but I beleive that is now fixed.

Cheers

PaulH

Looks good to me, Paul. My mouse hand thanks you for saving me the two clicks for every search I do.