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  • Showing only topics in ~tildes with the tag "search". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Is searching for comments possible?

      I never noticed this before today, but I don't seem to be able to search for comments. Is that supposed to be doable on Tildes? It took me way too long to figure out that the links at the top of...

      I never noticed this before today, but I don't seem to be able to search for comments. Is that supposed to be doable on Tildes?

      It took me way too long to figure out that the links at the top of the search results page are sort options; I had been clicking "Comments" hoping to see comment search results, and I was a bit confused why only full topics were still being listed. I guess comment search doesn't currently exist?

      12 votes
    2. SEO for niche topics

      Hi All, As yet another reddit transplant (YART) I've been watching the drama on that other platform and reflecting on what the most important aspects of successful online discussions are for me....

      Hi All,

      As yet another reddit transplant (YART) I've been watching the drama on that other platform and reflecting on what the most important aspects of successful online discussions are for me.

      One of the things that I value(d) most about reddit was the ability to use the keyword reddit in DuckDuckGo or Google searches to help me find more relevant and helpful content about a variety of niche subjects. So far, it seems to me like Tildes has some potential to fill this role based on its emphasis of thoughtful text content. Also, these types of searches add credibility to a site when random internet browsers stumble across a thread discussing their exact question.

      One thought that I had along these lines was that people who care about this type of thing could make a concerted effort to transport content from reddit and other sites to be shared here. I don't think it would be appropriate to just copy and paste text without adding at least a bit of original thoughts or context. However, I often find myself researching niche products or ideas to such an extent that I could write up a nice summary of all my findings. A post like that could be a nice crash course to others or a fun way to introduce people to ideas they didn't know about.

      Would people here be interested in consciously doing this type of thing? We could all make nice amalgamations of information we think is important as we independently research topics and post them here to boost discussion and boost Tildes threads in web search results.

      18 votes
    3. Tagging proposal: .wiki suffix

      There have been recent posts that reflect in-depth knowledge and significant effort to provide comprehensive information on a topic (examples here and here). Yes, it's possible to bookmark these...

      There have been recent posts that reflect in-depth knowledge and significant effort to provide comprehensive information on a topic (examples here and here).

      Yes, it's possible to bookmark these posts for individual reference. However, Tildes doesn't have a pinning feature given the current very loose organization of subjects/interest communities.

      In that absence, I'd like to suggest a globally used ".wiki" sub-tag appended to topics, to narrow search results to highly informative entries on a subject.

      Please let me know your thoughts on this.

      I'd go ahead and add the .wiki sub-tag to a couple of entries myself, but I've lost tagging privileges after a long stretch of inactivity. Please consider that I'm interested in volunteering again.

      21 votes
    4. Search for tag site-wide?

      Clicking a tag provides the search results for that tag in the local group. Since some topics appear across groups, I think it'd be useful to view site-wide results as well, optionally. Does that...

      Clicking a tag provides the search results for that tag in the local group. Since some topics appear across groups, I think it'd be useful to view site-wide results as well, optionally. Does that already exist?

      9 votes
    5. Username search?

      Nearly every time most of us want to mention someone, we need to find a post they commented in or posted, which will get increasingly harder over time, and especially so for less active users.

      12 votes
    6. New search capabilities available: phrases, excluding terms, alternatives ("or")

      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...

      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.

      52 votes
    7. You can now search your own topics and comments, and a theme preview page is available

      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...

      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

      40 votes
    8. Combining searches and filters

      The lack of ability to combine search functions on Tildes is becoming more and more of a pain point for me. I can filter for one tag or search for one word, but that's it. I can't narrow the...

      The lack of ability to combine search functions on Tildes is becoming more and more of a pain point for me. I can filter for one tag or search for one word, but that's it. I can't narrow the search in any way. I can't combine searches and filters and groups:

      • I can't search for a word within a group.

      • I can't search for a word within a set of topics filtered by a tag.

      • I can't filter by two separate tags at the same time.

      • I can't search for two separate words at the same time.

      As Tildes is growing larger, the ability to search better is becoming more necessary.

      Is there any possibility of bringing forward the work on searches so that some of these combinations can be enabled?

      10 votes
    9. Suggestion: searching through comments

      Right now, the search function only works by searching the titles of posts made. I'd like to be able to search through my comments on an occasion where I'd like to link someone to it to further...

      Right now, the search function only works by searching the titles of posts made.

      I'd like to be able to search through my comments on an occasion where I'd like to link someone to it to further the information provided. If I'd already written on the subject somewhere, I'd like to be able to provide the source, and add commentary more pertaining to the subject matter if necessary.

      Lacking that, is there a way to use Tildes' API to perform automated search myself?

      12 votes
    10. Minor search update: topic tags are now included in search

      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...

      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?

      47 votes
    11. Extremely basic search added

      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....

      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.

      118 votes
    12. Suggestion: Improving post findability

      I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search...

      I was reading a discussion about this on here earlier today, and I've already lost it! 😬 Sorry if this is just creating more noise, but we clearly need better ways to find content. The search feature will go a long way, but here are some other ideas:

      Tag search. On any topic with tags, the tags should be clickable links to URLs like https://tildes.net/tag/elder+scrolls. This page would show all topics that use that tag, with sort and filter options. There should be a way (maybe built into the search form) to type any tag and jump straight to this page.

      Recently viewed topics list. Reddit shows a sidebar listing the last n posts you viewed. It's admittedly a little creepy seeing your history displayed like that, but it's a useful way to jump back into conversations for follow-up later. The old Reddit design had a "clear" button to delete the history, but curiously that is no longer present in the redesign. (Privacy features like that should not be overlooked here.)

      Saved topics. Another feature from Reddit. Every post has a "Save" link below it, that adds the post to your personal saved posts list, which can reached from your profile. Saved post lists are only visible to the users that own them.

      Repost detection. I really like how Ask MetaFilter helps posters make sure their content is fresh before they publish it. The submit button under the new post form is labeled "Preview" and clicking it shows what the post will look like before publishing it. This gives posters the opportunity to proofread and ensure their text formatting is correct. More importantly, the site scans the content of the post and displays a list of five possible existing posts that match it:

      The following previously-posted questions might be related to the question you're asking. Please take a look before posting to see if any of these answer your question.

      This flow adds an additional click before you can actually post, but I think it's for the best. The slowdown politely nudges you toward considering the quality and originality of what you're about to say, without being overbearing. The main MetaFilter site also checks all URLs you enter to see if anyone has posted them before. Note that these tools don't prevent anyone from posting, they just empower users to avoid reposting and reinforce good posting behaviors.

      Repost flagging. I have a half-baked idea about allowing users to flag topics as reposts, but I haven't seen this implemented before. This would be separate from voting. A user wishing to flag a topic would be asked to provide the URL of an existing topic it duplicates. This wouldn't affect the topic itself, other than to add a small banner to the top of the page: "n users flagged this as a repost of the following topics: [list of links]". Then anyone would have the ability to [agree], [disagree], or append a link to the list. Public consensus would affect the future of the topic... if enough others agree the topic is redundant, it could be auto-deleted or just algorithmically prioritized lower than non-reposts. If enough disagree, the flag could be auto-removed from the topic. The usernames of the flaggers should be public, and there should be a way to view both a user's frequency of flagging and whether consensus agreed with those flags. Accountability would be important for this sort of system.

      Ability to subscribe to users. I saw the other feature request for a "friend" mechanic. I agree with the commenters who said it would be too much like a social network. However, I could see a use case for a "Subscribe" button on a user's profile page, just like the ones on group pages. This would cause all topics posted by that user to be included in your main page, even if they are in groups you aren't subscribed to.

      I'd be interested to hear your feedback on these suggestions, as well as other ideas specific to increasing content visibility.

      10 votes
    13. Tags and regional spelling?

      In ~comp, there's a post about optimizing a string parser, and one of the tags is "optimisation" instead of "optimization". This makes me curious, what's the official policy for regional spelling...

      In ~comp, there's a post about optimizing a string parser, and one of the tags is "optimisation" instead of "optimization". This makes me curious, what's the official policy for regional spelling differences in tags? Will people be encouraged to use exclusively American or British spellings, or will the search feature (when it arrives) automatically link results for both if you search for either?

      7 votes