HOW ABOUT A SEARCH ENGINE???

You know, there is one thing that would solve this repeated questioning and bantering and save everyone who runs these forums (and reads them) lots of time. A search engine for your forum and it's archives. Just about every decent (and even antiquated) discussion forum has some kind of a search engine where people can search for keywords, phrases or titles within posts and archives. This is NOT difficult to implement these days.

The way you have your forum set up now, if a researcher wants to look up past discussions, they have to wade through hundreds and hundreds of posts manually which may or may not be what she or he is looking for, which could take days, and this excessive time basically renders any discussion forum useless because no one wants to spend valuable time manually searching archives, reading every post. Also not having a search engine causes people to repeatedly post the same questions over and over and over again, because they don't have the time or desire to wade through everything. It's much easier to ask the same questions again than it is to do a search. SO they waste your time in answering the same questions over and over again.

When you say, "Do your homework, search the archives", OK, sure I'll go out and hire someone to spend a week searching them so I can find one needle in a BBS haystack hehe. Your forums are far too old and huge, to not have a search engine. You can add one for about a hundred bucks, your software may even be upgradeable, and if it is Agnes by Vestris, which I think it is, Agnes the current version has a built in search engine anyway.

I would also venture to guess that you are losing lots of regulars because your forums some of them are so big, that they have become un manageable and un searchable due to the fact that none of them have a search engine.

If your web person can't add one or does not want to spend a few hours upgrading or adding a search engine, if I was running the forum I would find a new web person (actually I would do it myself because I know how to do it).

I am simply amazed with all the PhD's running these forums, you guys with advanced decrees and all your academic and university experience, that none of you have demanded a search engine for your forums, especially with all the research experience and academic and internet experience you all (supposedly) have.

Replies:

Re:HOW ABOUT A SEARCH ENGINE???, by Henry Stein, 01/29/03

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