MOA forums need a better search tool

[Omega Man]

I need a bit more info Dennis. Maybe you could give me a couple of examples of what you are looking for here on the forum side of things.
I'm happy to take a look.
Thanks.
Gary

[DennisDarrow]

OK Gary, go to:

http://www.airforums.com/forums/

This is THE Airstream forum, much the same as the BMWMOA forum is for BMW motorcycles. My current need from them is information about the forced air propane heater motor in my unit needs replacement or new bearings because it is SCREAMING when in use or turning by hand. So, just as one should be able to do in the BMW FORUM, I go over to the search box and plug in: 89 Excella heater motor repair. Yes, I get 9 pages of information to search through; but I bet in the first couple of pages will be the information I need. If it was a thread I was already familiar with it would be fairly simple to just scan each page.

This is what I am talking about when I say that this is what we need to return to. Once we had this same search capability; but it went away in the effort to make room in the software or whatever you gurus call it so that we could have a forum based sales platform in order to get rid of the want ads in the News.........Now look, we have neither and we have no way to search that a "simple" person like me can use. Yes, there is some rigamoroll one can go through; but to me this chases away the casual user, new member, or wanna be member. What would we do for these folks if the forum search actually worked????.........NOT gonna beat a dead horse as I have already said........So, hope that answers what I would like to see........God bless you and Texas/Louisiana

[lkraus]

OK Gary, go to:

http://www.airforums.com/forums/

This is THE Airstream forum, much the same as the BMWMOA forum is for BMW motorcycles. My current need from them is information about the forced air propane heater motor in my unit needs replacement or new bearings because it is SCREAMING when in use or turning by hand. So, just as one should be able to do in the BMW FORUM, I go over to the search box and plug in: 89 Excella heater motor repair. Yes, I get 9 pages of information to search through; but I bet in the first couple of pages will be the information I need. If it was a thread I was already familiar with it would be fairly simple to just scan each page.

I have to say that I'm impressed. They seem to have at least one capability that I've sorely missed here: they can search for three letter terms. That's been a real frustration since so many features on our bikes have three-letter abbreviations and acronyms like ESA, ASC, GPS, GSA, GSW, RTW,NAV, and let's not forget - BMW.

I thought this was a shortcoming of vBulletin, but I see they are running vBulletin 3.8.8 Beta 1.

[Omega Man]

OK Gary, go to:

http://www.airforums.com/forums/

This is THE Airstream forum, much the same as the BMWMOA forum is for BMW motorcycles. My current need from them is information about the forced air propane heater motor in my unit needs replacement or new bearings because it is SCREAMING when in use or turning by hand. So, just as one should be able to do in the BMW FORUM, I go over to the search box and plug in: 89 Excella heater motor repair. Yes, I get 9 pages of information to search through; but I bet in the first couple of pages will be the information I need. If it was a thread I was already familiar with it would be fairly simple to just scan each page.

This is what I am talking about when I say that this is what we need to return to. Once we had this same search capability; but it went away in the effort to make room in the software or whatever you gurus call it so that we could have a forum based sales platform in order to get rid of the want ads in the News.........Now look, we have neither and we have no way to search that a "simple" person like me can use. Yes, there is some rigamoroll one can go through; but to me this chases away the casual user, new member, or wanna be member. What would we do for these folks if the forum search actually worked????.........NOT gonna beat a dead horse as I have already said........So, hope that answers what I would like to see........God bless you and Texas/Louisiana

The search box looks pretty similar to what we have using the "Advanced search" feature- We seem to have the "basic feature" up first....then the "advanced search".
Any help?
Gary

[20774]

They seem to have at least one capability that I've sorely missed here: they can search for three letter terms. That's been a real frustration since so many features on our bikes have three-letter abbreviations and acronyms like ESA, ASC, GPS, GSA, GSW, RTW,NAV, and let's not forget - BMW.

Although the settings panel indicates the minimum word search length can be changed to less than 4, it appears that it cannot. I wonder if older version of vBulletin really had that capability...I have no way of really knowing. Obviously, the intent was to keep search times down in case people began to use words such as "the", "and", "for" etc in their search terms. However, I notice there's a capability to add certain words to be included in the search output regardless of length. Thus it would be possible to add critical 3-letter abbreviations into the mix to help with searching. I might take some thought to figure out what a reasonable set of those abbreviations are. Possibly the above is a good starting point.

[Omega Man]

The short- three letter searches work real well using the "Tag Cloud"..... have a try.
OM

[179212]

I think 20774 is doing a wonderful job for every question I have posted very quickly a response from Kurt has appeared with appropriate links that along with help from other members have answered my questions