I keep trying to find specific posts on this forum, but I cannot find them. Recently, we had a post about cellular providers that work with the Librem 5 and I know this has been discussed here.
However, it does not show in the search.
Usually, for posts like these I would help provide users with the previous discussions, but I cannot seem to find them.
Does anyone else have this issue with Discourse? I wanted to create the discussion here.
Thank you all so much for your time and for helping create such a wonderful community.
One thing that I have seen is that āSort by Relevanceā in Discourse and in some other apps Iāve used for my work recently never seems to make sense to me. The data metrics are not smart and donāt know whatās relevant. But if I sort by āLatest Postā then I get a chronological history which makes more sense to me.
To be fully honest, I thought perhaps I wrote it.
Regardless, there used to be a more thorough discussion on AT&T/ATTās support for the Librem 5.
I was hoping to add the post to the discussion as, unless I recall improperly, some staff members member helped provide details as to why AT&T is not fully supported.
I mean .. a company or project whose sole function on earth is to do good search.
Discourse has built-in search but project resources are going to be spread across a range of functional areas and search may not be the highest priority.
Just to elaborate on that ā¦ dedicated search functions allow boolean operators and allow careful overrides so that āAT&Tā is not misinterpreted, and support stemming/synonyms, and may allow some control over what is a word delimiter, and allow proximity matching ā¦ yada yada yada.
The bottom line is that you can always use an external search provider (of your choice) - for those parts of the forum that are public - and then you get whatever better functionality is offered by that provider. And, yes, you are even free to use Google.
I think that it is the ā&ā messing things up, and ATT works better as long as the post or title also contain att (in any case), but things like attack also match. " ATT " works better, but if there is any punctuation instead of " " before or after ATT there will not be a match.
Or, in short, good searching is harder than it looks e.g. the ampersand character is usually a word delimiter but not in this one forum-specific case. (By forum-specific I mean that AT&T will be mentioned in this forum far more than in an āaverageā forum, and with much greater significance. So we would like an exception even if the average forum wouldnāt bother.)
It would be nice if something like AT\&T or regular expressions like AT?T or AT.T would work, but no such luck. We could just start calling them Southwestern Bell, which is their real name. (In the US in the 1980ās all the regional operating companies (Baby Bells) got forcibly spun off from AT&T by the government with reason. (āWe donāt care, we donāt have to, weāre the phone company.ā - Lilly Tomlinās Ernestine on Rowan and Martinās Laugh In) Over time SBC bought some of the other Baby Bells and then eventually the desiccated husk of the former AT&T to get the name.)
Thatās really really hard to do efficiently, in the general case, when you may have gigabytes of post text to examine. (With general REs as a basis of comparison, AT.T actually wouldnāt be too bad.)
You donāt want the search function to be a DoS attack. Some web sites (some forums) only allow (advanced) search by logged-in users, for this reason.
As a recent real-world example of the difficulties of roll-your-own search functionality ā¦ go to IMDB and try to find the film whose title is 1. (Just my opinion, but it was a disappointing film, so you may be better off not finding it. )
There are some challenging trade-offs between simplicity/usability and richness of functionality.
But you donāt need REs to find AT&T. All you need is for both the indexing code and the client-interface code to recognise it as a word (which it is).
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