Searching the Forums is difficult.........is it just me?

I'm having the same trouble. The search results are not near specific as they should be. You can narrow them down by author, but most of the time you have no idea who the author of a post you might find useful is. I've typed in word for word the title of a past group build, and I have to search through thousands of posts just to find the group build thread I want.

This fact (plus a substantial government grant) will get you a like amount of bitter, coffee-like liquid from your nearest Starbucks (or “Starburnt” as I prefer to call it). The Search Result is garbage since the last FSM website upgrade.

R_Kwas

Seattle slicksters who buy cheap coffee beans, overroast the bejesus out of them, then try to convince people their coffee tastes good.  Sorry, I tried it (twice!), and I’m not buying the ad campaign, and it, ever again!  These whackos are also so presumptuous as to believe that they can put one of their joints into Vienna (where they have had coffee houses since before Mozart’s time, and been making and enjoying the finest coffee in the world), and think they can show those uppity Viennese a thing or two about coffee!!!  I expect them to go the way of that big deal, here today / gone tomorrow, donut joint at some point!

Very true Tom, used to be a lot better...The search function that is...

I agree. It's not as bad as Yahoo but still has a focus that's so broad it's out of focus.

Same here. I was looking for some DAK models and got 100s of totaly useless s....

Agreed... the old search engine was FAR SUPERIOR.... the few times that I have tried using it since the changover have pretty much been exercises in frustration...

I hate to say this, because I like the FSM forums very much, in general.  But the changes they made a month or so ago seem to have created a lot of problems and bugs, and I don't see them being very active in fixing them. I'd like to see them go bad to the way the forums worked before those changes :-)

Hi Don,

We are being as active as we can in addressing the issues that come up. There are 17 magazines in the building, all of them running on the same Forum software. Some of the complaints that we have for the FSM Forum aren't concerns for the other magazine forums and vice versa. The way that the planning was done for the upgrade is out of FSM's hands, and we only have so many guys in the online department to deal with issues. They've corrected the biggest ones and have had to move on to get the other forums for the other magazines upgraded and running. Online is now in the process of making a sweep back through and doing cleanup actions.

I have passed on your concerns about the "mark as read" option and reader preferences. I have also made a note and passed along concerns about the search functionality. If either of these things can be changed or improved, I'll be sure to let you know. As I've said in other threads, some things we can deal with in-house and others we have to wait for the software provider to handle.

I understand that the change didn't  go over as well as we would have liked. There is a lot that I don't particularly care for with the new format. However, wish as we might, we can't walk the Forum back to a previous software version.

To try to make things a little easier, I'm going to start a new thread in the Community Assistance section where I want to gather a list of concerns into a single document to hand over to our online team. I'll post a link back in here once it's up.

Thanks for helping us make the Forum a better place. I know that we can't always make things the way everyone wants them, but, hopefully, we can make everything acceptable for everyone.

EDIT: Here's the link, as promised.

Tim

Thanks for the reply. I think that a single thread for gripes about about the new system for submission to the techs is a very good way to get them all in the right spot.