Any searching tips for this forum?

It happens quite frequently that I'll search on a term that I know I've seen discussed, and then the search results lie to me and say it isn't in the forum.

For instance, a search just now on:

llXorBase64StringsCorrect (carefully trimmed, no spaces)

says, bzzzzz, you lose, please play again.

Yet, here it indeed is:

/54/d6/228064/1.html

and prolly a zillion (okay, loads) of other postings as well.

Has anyone figured out any secrets into tricking the search here into, well, searching?

Chaz

Today, the search tool for this forum denies all knowledge of any discussion of the term llRequestPermissions .

What are the chances this term has never been discussed?

See the second part of the response:

"The following words are either very common, *too long*, or too short and were not included in your search : llRequestPermissions"

[emphasis mine]

So you think it thinks llRequestPermissions is too long a search term?? Google doesn't.

Or maybe it thought it was too common a term, such as "the".

Erp.

This forum isn't Google.

I believe it depends entirely on how the admin(s) of the forum set up the search limits, based on how they think server load would best be balanced. llRequestPermissions is 20 characters, and there aren't many 20-character words in the english language which come up in normal conversation.

Well, the strength of the search engine here just adds to the fun of figuring out how LSL works, don't it :} After all, gawd forbid that searching on function language terms should bring up, um, function language terms? LOL.

>> based on how they think server load would best be balanced

hmm, I've written a fair old number of search engine stuff in me day, and I've never restricted someone based on character length in order to balance server load. Though i suppose it depends on the quality of the back end, etc.

Anyway, I ain't shooting the messenger .... just going grrr... grin.

Who can I ask to have the search word length limit extended then for us? We need to be able to search on functions, for goodness sake.

If I remember my searching algorithms, wouldn't a long search word make searching go faster?

generaly yes... the problem isn't in the search algorithm, it's in the indexing feature... words of a certain size (too small, too big, too frequent) are not being indexed, and hence not being searched.

sometimes it helps the break up the command, as people often shorthand command names like searching 'request permissions' instead of 'llRequestPermissions' etc...

another trick, if the command has associated constants is to search for those, or parts of them... an example would be PERMISSION_DEBIT, which returns nothing (too long) but DEBIT returns several threads about requesting debit permissions...

similarly searching base64 returns several threads including the xtea encryption thread which would probably have been helpful for OP

also if you happen to know the name of the command, looking it up on one of the wikkis is usually helpful too...

the format for addreses linked to lsl commands for the LSL_Portal is
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/llUnSit <-- capitalization counts, kinda annoying
and for rpg stats its
http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=LLunsit <-- capitalization doesn't matter

the first is likely to have examples and or links to other articles with a very dry technical nature (but always includes delay times and energy stats) geared towards experienced coders, and is in need of some editors to add examples in some spots (big bloody hint)

the second is generally more complete on the page info, geared more to those newer to coding, but seems to have lost alot of editors so can get out of date

lsl portal can be edited by any secondlife user (your av name and password are used). sadly it's been running a bit slow but hopefully the current updates to forums and wikis will speed this up

Make sure your forum User CP preferences do not limit the time period you can view back in history for previous posts. I seem to recall that caused some problems for me as it defaulted to 30 days or something like that.

It depends on the algorithm, but probably not. A binary search on a balanced tree, for example, will need to do the log n string comparisons regardless, and a long search word won't help.

I have opened a support incident on this, as it's clearly not working properly.

if by properly, you mean "like many other search features" then your right... it is however functioning as designed... limiting the seach term size reduces the amount of table references, which makes the reference table smaller... that's why it's designed this way

a better suggestion would be to ask them up the word length limits, maybe on a per forum basis... or at least include lsl commands seeing as it is a scripting forum

I have pointed out the issue that in the scripting fora, one is unable to search on many function terms. They can determine the cause, and if they are able to / care to fix it.

heh good luck with that, my experience is that you need to spoon feed the problem AND the solution to them, otherwise more pressing demands from the higher ups take precedence and the forget to research the problem or it ends up in the circular file, forgotten untill someone notices it or someone else points it out again... I think that's what was partly behind their decision to open source the viewer code.

Just a FYI. You could always cheat and use "llRequest" as a search term. That for example returns this result:

/54/81/189144/1.html