h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The 'Conversation Forums' search doesn't seem to work at all. It doesn't show any results for any of the searches I tried. I can't find any string which will actually produce any results. Is this thing broken? If so are you going to remove it?

It's been temporarily turned off due to server load problems. We hope one day that it will come back again.

It was disabled some time ago because it kept, er... crashing the site. We live in hope that one day there'll be a proper search facility.

Spooky

Traveller in Time on top
"More a matter of reading the most recent conversations just before hitting the post button

You mean the bugs are serious not

Sorry Elton, < A710092 >

Search was not used to find Elton "

now the the BBC use DNa on all the message board perhaps it would be nice to have a bbc wide way of searching threads, perhaps an extra option on the main BBC search page

I understand posts 2, 3, and 4 but I am really lost by post 5. What does it mean?

Buggered if I know

> "I am really lost by post 5. What does it mean?"

Tit arrived late, without it being obvious that the first couple of replies were close simulposts. So the "reading the most recent conversations" comment reflects that lack of knowledge in suggesting a failure to read what had been written by others caused the duplication. (Although I have been known on ACEing someone, after taking a long time to compose the message, to then check one last time in a separate window whether someone else had posted in between).

The ghost smiley is an inaccurate reference to the "spooky" comment. The dog smiley is probably a substitute for a hamster (which doesn't exist as a smiley), given that they are reputed to run the servers and the follow-up reference to Elton (plus link to picture page).

The last line was a comment that search wasn't used to find that hamster page (it being one that TiT probably keeps in stock somewhere). Though it's slightly misleading because search _would_ still find pages, unlike threads.

Traveller in Time again composing a slow reply
"'SEF' is nearly right

Except for is not a , just another rhodent


I saw the question and before I pressed post 'Greydesk' came with the complete answer. On opening another thread (with the idea to reuse the window for searching for 'Elton') I noticed it was on 'Elton's page. ."

Ok, thanks everybody for your answers and explanations.

Um. The conversation search has been turned off for what seems like years now. But it's still there, pretending to be working. And if you use it, you are simply told that there are no matches. Ridiculous. This is a bug, really, and you'd think it was fairly easily fixed, too. Remove convo search from the list of options for as long as it's not working. Can't be too difficult.

TRiG.

No-oooooooo!!!!!

Don't let them remove this from the options. We want this back some day. We don't want its current absence to fade from the collective memory - Oceania is at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia, and all that jazz...

Ditto. It needs to be in evidence.

Some sort of 'Out of Order' sign would be helpful, though.

And it's always possible that it will be reinstated.

<./>Search?searchtype=forum&searchstring=hootoo</.>

No Results Found

We're sorry, but your search for 'hootoo' didn't find any matches.


Um. If it could say instead:

No Results Found

We're sorry, but the conversation search is temporarily disabled.


What d'ye think o' that, then?

TRiG.

That works for me

Traveller in Time studying the search for some time
"Very common words are omitted in the result.

Sometimes the search will give a timeout.
With the new caching routines this may result in the result of a previous search. <?>"

"With the new caching routines this may result in the result of a previous search. <?>"

No it won't. Stop making stuff up.