On Sunday, I took the site down for a short downtime to upgrade the database from PostgreSQL version 10 to 12. One of the main reasons I wanted to do that upgrade was to get access to a new search function, and I've updated to using it now, so we have multiple nice new search capabilities available.

These should all be pretty familiar since a lot of other search systems and search engines have similar capabilities with the same syntax:

• As before, by default, searching for multiple words will be treated as "all of these terms". So if you search ~games for steam play, you'll get all topics that have both "steam" and "play" in them.
• Phrases can now be searched for by putting double quotes around them. Searching ~games for "steam play" in quotes will only find topics that specifically have "steam play".
• Excluding terms can be done by putting a minus sign in front of it. For example, if you wanted to try to find ~games posts about Blizzard and exclude the recent China controversy, you could search for blizzard -china.
• Alternatives can be searched for by using "or". This changes to "any of these terms" instead of "all of these terms". For example, searching for overwatch or diablo will find any topic with either of those terms, instead of both.
• These capabilities can be combined, so you can exclude phrases, use "or" with phrases, and so on. For example: blizzard -"hong kong" or diablo.

This all works both through the main site topic search (at the top of the sidebar) as well as the new search for your own topics/comments.

I'm going to write a page for the Docs with info about these capabilities, but I think I want to try to find a full specification of what's supported first to make sure I cover it properly. The PostgreSQL docs are pretty vague about it, so I'll probably need to take a look in the actual code.

Please let me know if you notice any issues with it, or if anything's confusing that I should make sure to document.

And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

Two updates today:

Theme Preview page

This is another contribution from @deing, who's been working on this one for a while. It ended up being more complicated than it originally seemed and still has a few minor oddities, but I think it ended up coming out quite well.

When you're on the Settings page, there's now a "View theme previews" link just below the theme-selection dropdown near the top. That will take you to this new Theme Preview page. The blocks with the theme names at the top give you a quick idea of each theme's color scheme, and you can click them to change the whole page's theme and see what it looks like on the example topics and comments below.

I should also mention that Gruvbox themes (with Light and Dark variants) were added about a month ago by @lugubris. I don't think I ever announced those being added, but you can easily check them out here now.

Search your own posts

@mrbig's recent post with multiple suggestions reminded me to work on this one. You know the drill: it's minimal, the interface is a little weird, etc. but you can now search your own topics and comments (separately).

To use it, go to your own user page and click into either "Topics" or "Comments" from the top, you can't still be on the default "All posts" view. When you go into either of the individual post types, there will be a search box at the top, and you can use that to search your own posts.

Just like the overall site search, the search always works as "look for all of these words", so only include multiple words if you want to find posts that contain all of them. I'm hoping to upgrade the PostgreSQL version that I'm using fairly soon, which should make for some easy enhancements to search, so hopefully soon we'll have some more capabilities there.

Let me know if you notice any strangeness with the search results.

And as usual, I've given everyone 10 invites, accessible on the invite page

Not a very major update, but I figured it was worth letting everyone know: search has been expanded a bit to also cover topics' tags in addition to their title and markdown (for text topics). So if you search for a term that was only included in a topic's tags but not its title/text, it should come up in the results now.

On that subject, are there any other pieces of data that you think should be included by default in search? In the future, I'd like to support searching certain parts of data deliberately (for example, maybe by writing a query like url:article to find only link topics with "article" in their url), but that's different from including it automatically in all searches. As a specific example, if you search for "youtube.com" or even "youtube", should all link topics from YouTube come up, or only topics that have the word "youtube" somewhere in their title/text/tags?

Okay, okay. We really needed some sort of search, so I decided to just get an extremely basic version out today. It's very limited, but it should work for now and can be improved as we go forward.

Details/limitations:

• Currently, the search only includes the title and the text of the post (if it's a text topic). It doesn't include the tags, the group, the link, the author name, comments, anything. Only the title and text right now.
• There's no way to restrict the search to specific group(s) yet. Just full-site search.
• All searches are "all of these words". There's no phrase-searching yet, or "X or Y", or anything else.
• The search results page is just a quick hack on the normal topic listing page and will probably display some things weirdly in some cases (like the message when there's no results).

It's a start though, and certainly better than not having any search at all. There will probably be a lot of minor issues, but let me know if you notice anything especially broken with it.