Improved Searching on Forum

[Bedawyn]

Not quite a wish for FreeCiv proper, but we can't work on improving FreeCiv if we can't learn about what's already going on. The wiki documentation leaves a lot to be desired (and will continue to as long as it's on Wikia -- I love writing technical docs, but refuse to work on Wikia, and I doubt I'm the only person who'd be more likely to edit on a different site). This makes it all the more important for us to be able to search the forums and find information here, but the current search is badly limited by far too many unindexed terms.

For instance, it's currently impossible to search the forum for information on the Alien World ruleset. Search on "alien" -- no, that's too common a word so we're not going to bother trying. Even "alien world" in quotes in the advanced search is "too common". "Alien world" + ruleset, nope, no luck there either. I wanted to read up on creating new terrain tiles before trying it myself, but nope, "terrain" is too common too, as well as "new terrain tiles" in quotes. In fact, I haven't had one search topic come up with anything other than "we're ignoring all your search terms, even when you're using the exact-phrase search". No, that's not quite right -- "nationset" and "nset" came up with no search results, but since then I tried "nation set" as an exact phrase, I ended up with the "we're ignoring your search terms" result anyway.

It doesn't look like there's currently any way to effectively search the forums other than manually browsing topic titles and hoping the post titles are accurately descriptive.

[Jim-11]

All the forums I have visited have a similar search problem. Try site: http://forum.freeciv.org/ your search term.