IP.Search

[The Geek]

What are your thoughts on the swiftness of the search. Its hard to get a good compare between vB and IP in this area because I am unsure of either site hardware.

 

I bring this up because the 'view new content' (only search I have really used yet) seems really lethargic on all the sites I have been on. Considering how swift and responsive the rest of the sites seem to be, the search seems like its choking up somewhere. Or is it just me?

 

To me, search responsiveness (and of course relevance) is crucial.

 

Couple other things:

 

1- Is there a way to not show already read threads in the 'new content' results (kind of like vB) or do I just need to get used to it again?

 

2- Do recent blog comments show up in 'New content'?

 

3- Love the new content page overall but would love a New Content portal that would show last x activity from specific zones. I think this would be fricken huge. Can this be done with Invision Community Pages?

 

4- Would love for the 'New Content' tabs to specifically highlight what sections have new content without having to browse to them.

 

TA

[Brandon]

What are your thoughts on the swiftness of the search. Its hard to get a good compare between vB and IP in this area because I am unsure of either site hardware.

 

I bring this up because the 'view new content' (only search I have really used yet) seems really lethargic on all the sites I have been on. Considering how swift and responsive the rest of the sites seem to be, the search seems like its choking up somewhere. Or is it just me?

 

To me, search responsiveness (and of course relevance) is crucial.

 

Couple other things:

 

1- Is there a way to not show already read threads in the 'new content' results (kind of like vB) or do I just need to get used to it again?

 

2- Do recent blog comments show up in 'New content'?

 

3- Love the new content page overall but would love a New Content portal that would show last x activity from specific zones. I think this would be fricken huge. Can this be done with Invision Community Pages?

 

4- Would love for the 'New Content' tabs to specifically highlight what sections have new content without having to browse to them.

 

TA

1. I think so

 

2. yup, if you're looking at the blogs and his the new post link, it will show the newest blog post.. I don't actually like the "new content" link. I've been talking with Matt to see how I can improve things at my site.

 

3. yes it can be done with Invision Community Pages, I just tossed our current homepage one afternoon, I need to do some work to it.

 

4. not sure what you mean?

[AWS]

The internal search works fairly well on most of the larger sites I visit. There is an option to use Spinx. All you have to do is turn it on if you have Spinx installed. When you do a search it searches across all content. The results page will be tabbed with results from all apps installed. The get new does seem to exclude read posts. Read marking to me works as it should. I can go to a site, get new content, read a few threads and come back an hour or 2 later and pick up where I left off. I've never been able to do that on any vbulletin forum.

 

IPB needs less resources. IPB's site runs on a single server where as vBulletins runs across an array of servers. That says volumes to me. There is a thread about the server hardware on the IPB site.

 

It sounds like you are going through what I went through. In the end you have to look at the big picture. Is vbuletin anything more than a money grab now? Will vbulletin even be in existence in another 2 years? Talk to some of the people that have sold sites to IB to get a glimpse of the business practices. Look at the dev cycle. 4.0 released with major bugs and a ton of minor bugs. 4.01 scheduled to be released 3 weeks after gold. 4.02 3 weeks after that. You could see v5 in a year and a half. This make EOL 3.8.x in 3 years. This dev cycle similar to a company I worked for. Get the product out fast, fix the bugs with minor releases and get the major upgrade version out fast to garner more sales. I don't have to tell you where that company is now. Look long term and the decision will be much easier for you.

[The Geek]

2. yup, if you're looking at the blogs and his the new post link, it will show the newest blog post.. I don't actually like the "new content" link. I've been talking with Matt to see how I can improve things at my site.

I mean, blog comments. New comments aren't easy to see IMO

 

4. not sure what you mean?

I like the 'New Content' result page where you can easily see New Content for each section, however many times those sections are empty. For instance you View New Content in your forums then click the blogs tab and its empty. It would be nice to have the tab highlighted if there is new content in that section. I would think this could be done by a user field that stores the last date that section was accessed. It wouldn't be as smooth as using read markers, but suspect read markers would be a serious resource drain.

 

The internal search works fairly well on most of the larger sites I visit. There is an option to use Spinx. All you have to do is turn it on if you have Spinx installed. When you do a search it searches across all content. The results page will be tabbed with results from all apps installed. The get new does seem to exclude read posts. Read marking to me works as it should. I can go to a site, get new content, read a few threads and come back an hour or 2 later and pick up where I left off. I've never been able to do that on any vbulletin forum.

 

IPB needs less resources. IPB's site runs on a single server where as vBulletins runs across an array of servers. That says volumes to me. There is a thread about the server hardware on the IPB site.

 

It sounds like you are going through what I went through. In the end you have to look at the big picture. Is vbuletin anything more than a money grab now? Will vbulletin even be in existence in another 2 years? Talk to some of the people that have sold sites to IB to get a glimpse of the business practices. Look at the dev cycle. 4.0 released with major bugs and a ton of minor bugs. 4.01 scheduled to be released 3 weeks after gold. 4.02 3 weeks after that. You could see v5 in a year and a half. This make EOL 3.8.x in 3 years. This dev cycle similar to a company I worked for. Get the product out fast, fix the bugs with minor releases and get the major upgrade version out fast to garner more sales. I don't have to tell you where that company is now. Look long term and the decision will be much easier for you.

Thanks for the feedback. I am drawn to the Sphinx support, however I have also heard that there are some issues with sphinx (haven't really looked close into it yet though). IMO IPB's site still feels really sluggish when searching or viewing new content. Still on the fence about vB. I agree with your comments regarding their MO, however they still ahve the ability to stay the leader, its just that the gap is rapidly closing. I need to understand IPB more to be 100% sold on the system and I am lacking the time right now to do that :(

[MattM]

Just a few things: We run a stock Invision Community Forum. We don't have memcache/apc installed. We don't use Sphinx, we use normal MySQL FT searching. We also run everything on one machine, SQL and PHP on one VPS (it's not even on its own server).

 

We do this because we want a fair test bed to work from. It's very useful for trying out new ideas and running queries to optimise them. We also run hundreds of hosting servers so we always keep on top of performance. There's no point in making an upgrade that means we have to double our hardware requirement overnight. :)

 

There are two types of "View New Content": the default type is based on the topic marking system. This checks all the topics you've read against the last time you marked the board as read and displays any topics you've not clicked upon. This is a little slower than the other method which just shows all new content since your last visit. This setting is under "My Settings" > "General Settings".

 

Regarding blog comments - this is an improvement I'm hoping to make for 3.1.0 or during the 3.1 branch. I want search to allow 'sub-apps'. Right now you can only specify one data source per application.

 

Hope that helps clarify a few things.

[The Geek]

Sorry for the late response Matt, I just saw this. Thanks for the clarification, it helps!