growing

I started this journey as a small seedling


just add enough water and I may grow out into a tree


There are no plans to introduce a search feature onto the message boards at the moment.

In considering whether to add a new board feature like this we have to consider how it would work across all 40 BBC message boards, and how implementing a search would affect the message board service overall. Search works well on small private message board systems because the search programme has a small number of posts to index, but the BBC has over 6 million users posting just under a million posts a month. Searching through all of these messages to pull up results would take a huge amount of server hardware investment and at the moment we don't have the budget to do this. It would also take up a large amount of the coder's time, and at the moment they're already fully booked out on other message board/online community related projects until the end of 2007.

If we were to start looking at ways of doing this, we'd need to decide whether a search would search all words in a posting, or all words in just the titles of postings, or whether to approach the issue a different way, perhaps allowing using to 'tag' their comments with key words.

Searching through all words in all posts would be *very* server heavy, as the BBC message boards are very busy. So we could perhaps search just through the titles, that would be more practical - but we wonder how beneficial that would really be, many titles do not contain wording that would be useful to search, and many conversations drift off topic - so the key information that you're looking for - perhaps the title of a TV programme - might not come up anyway, as the key words were in the body of the conversation rather than in the title of the discussion.

Implementing new technology to allow people to add key words to their discussion might be the better way to proceed, but then we'd have to consider whether a key word system would need to have a profanity filter applied to it, or whether the key words would be moderated (some bright spark would be bound work out that it was a good way to disrupt the message boards by tagging discussions with rude words!) - so even the simpler 'tagging with key words system' becomes a far more complex bit of programming for the coders.

So, because on a large system like this this would be a complex piece of work to implement, and our coders only have a limited amount of time and budget, we're unable to add this bit of functionality at the moment.

It might be possible to add something like this in the future, but we would also want to consider other alternatives that might actually work better - a categorisation system for instance might actually help people to find relevant information quicker than a search facility - but that again would take considerable programming.

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