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Dec 15, 2013 at 8:07am
Lack of Advanced Forum Search is Crippling for Max Development
I’ve been working on numerous Max and Jitter development projects recently, and I’ve found it absolutely maddening to not be able to search the Dev forum when I (frequently) come across issues often caused by the not particularly comprehensive documentation of the Max (and especially Jitter) SDKs.
I’ve very rarely had a problem I could not solve by searching the Dev forums, but it is impossible currently to wade through the masses of results from every forum for development-specific posts.
This is a really serious problem. Cycling 74 have a massive mine of useful information available in this forum but it’s currently impossible to access.
I have raised this issue twice before (http://cycling74.com/forums/topic/new-forums-advanced-search-missing-again/#post-249096) but even the Google workaround isn’t functioning now.
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Dec 15, 2013 at 6:08pm
I agree so SO much. This forum is a joke and has been for quite some time. It seems to receive constant infuriating tweaking but there is never a look in for essential features such as advanced search or pming. I’ve given up searching and accept the loss.
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Dec 16, 2013 at 5:54am
I’ve been using Google with the site: specifier for so long to search the forum that I’ve forgotten it had a built-in search function.
Yes, it would be nice for the forum to have a smarter search function. But does the work-around buy you anything?
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Dec 16, 2013 at 6:32am
What’s frustrating is when a technology swap removes things you are used to. In the past i had the ability to mark all messages read, a better search engine, i was able to sent private messages to users. At the same time i don’t use at all the new stuff. The result is that i’m reading only the dev forum now. That’s surely not due only to the behavior of that forum. But this new style is an image of what the Max/MSP community is going to be. And that makes some people (me) upset ;-)
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Dec 17, 2013 at 7:33am
Wow I’m amazed… and please enlighten me, do I understand correctly that currently there’s no way to search through the forums specifically? Not even talking about advanced searches is it currently even impossible to search for two keywords in for instance the ‘dev’ forum? Or am i missing something embarrassingly obvious?
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Dec 18, 2013 at 6:29am
@Peter – I agree – i use google that way and find it works great!
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Dec 18, 2013 at 6:49am
Yes, Google is the way to go – not only for search features but for speed. The lag on this forum is significant… and often affects my choice to visit, let alone search. It’s also quite ironic that a community-driven project like Max has a forum that doesn’t allow members to message each other. It’s been half a year now.
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Dec 18, 2013 at 10:43am
Agreed. Private messages were a great way to not have to communicate your email address to the world. They also provided useful ways of pointing things out privately and politely.
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Dec 18, 2013 at 4:34pm
Hi everyone – I hear you, and I apologize for features you wish were here but aren’t. re: advanced forum search, and private messaging, we’re considering our options. re: the speed of the forum, I hope you find it significantly faster lately. We’ve been able to shave more than 90% off of the average response time.
Ben
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Dec 18, 2013 at 6:03pm
“significantly faster”, yes, but it’s still quite slow and significantly slower than before before – when there was private messaging
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Dec 19, 2013 at 12:32am
re: speed and PMs (and search)
I never understood, or was even told, why the move to the new host happened. It just did. Fixing non-broken things? The site looks good, but handles like a drunk cow. There has since been a litany of problems with posting, uploading and browsing. I miss private messaging, and the search list hierarchy is a bad joke. Visiting this site has become a frustration, marred by intermittent behaviour and reduced functionality. Not good.
2c
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Dec 19, 2013 at 2:31am
No more need to search boys! Just be connected to the flow. Everything smells like Twitter nowadays ;-)
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Dec 19, 2013 at 3:08am
OT
I heard an informed opinion yesterday that relegates Twitter/FB/G+/LinkedIn etc to the realm of commercial MMOGs: contribute your personal data then join the fun.
Not for me, I’m afraid (sic)
Brendan
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Dec 19, 2013 at 4:34am
@noob_meister – I’m sorry for your frustration. We definitely want the forum to be a good experience for everyone, so I appreciate all candid feedback.
In fact there were several things fixed by our upgrade to the latest version of this forum software, but they were mostly “invisible” administrative or back-end improvements. There were also regressions due to plugin incompatibility – eg, private messaging, advanced search. We’re working to patch these up now.
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Dec 19, 2013 at 4:41am
@Ben
I love my old Mitsubishi Carisma, but it’s a bucket!
And now I’m paranoid about being resistant to change……..aaaaaargh, no, please don’t let me morph into a Tory. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
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Dec 20, 2013 at 11:33am
I remain convinced that the purpose of the slowdown was to stop people like me who complain a lot -:)
More seriously (I hope!), it is certainly the case that I have significantly reduced my participation in these forums, answering other peoples’ questions when I could less often than I used to, because it took too long to go through them.
These days I’m just keeping an eye out using an RSS feed but rarely actually visit.
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Jan 2, 2014 at 2:49pm
I feel like there was a preview feature the last time I posted too. For me that was very important as I find typesetting and layout an important part of communication.
Also, I don’t think it was like this before, but it feels very strange entering a post in a monospace font when that is not how the posts are shown. I guess that may be good for when you put code into your post? /shrug
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Jan 2, 2014 at 6:37pm
My participation in the forum has also reduced significantly. It is by far the slowet forum I use, it feels like it’s constantly stalling. Rather than feeling light and easy to use – it feels clunky and slow… This plus missing functionality. I used to check in a couple times a day – now it’s a couple of times a month. This is not all down to the site but a lot of it is.
Search is broken in every forum I use so cycling is not alone there… It’s still frustrating but I guess Google will always be better.
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Jan 2, 2014 at 11:39pm
To be fair, the forum runs faster those days (thanks Ben), isn’t it?
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Jan 3, 2014 at 2:35am
forum speed is like a thunderflash now
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Jan 3, 2014 at 4:43am
I wouldn’t say that but it definitely sped up.
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Jan 4, 2014 at 8:32am
It’s faster on the laptop but on my I do most browsing on the iPad and it takes 10 to 15 secs to open a thread. My contributions are usually not great anyways so maybe it’s for the best :)
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