[Migration in prod.] The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

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Jatsko
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Jatsko »

admin3 wrote:As for search - it seems as though the forum somehow can't complete building a search index. I should definitely look into that.
Don't know if this helps or if you're already aware anyways, but I've noticed that when searching terms, there are results that come up from time to time, but they appear to be almost exclusively from late 2012 after that large migration. I think December 19th is the most recent one from that year I've seen. Barely anything from all the years following, and I think a few terms I searched yielded few results from like the last year or something. So that definitely seems like the search just is not pulling from basically any posts from 2013 onward.

EDIT: I searched "yielded" after making this reply, and this reply showed up as the lone result. So it definitely has the ability to index recent posts as well as late 2012 posts, but beyond that I'm not sure. However, this post containing the word "exam" from two days ago did not show up. This recent post from just today showed up when searching "previous", though. I wonder if it is only indexing posts from the same day, which then get purged when the next day comes.

Also, congrats on 3.3.5!
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Ancient Crystal
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Ancient Crystal »

The favicon looks odd on my phone, though. I should look into that, too.
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admin3
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by admin3 »

Search should be properly operational again.

This one's a bit embarrassing. I appear to have at some point misunderstood how building the search index worked, thinking it could run in the background when, as it turns out, you have to keep the browser window open. (Which I guess makes sense, since it's all ultimately a web server, I haven't really installed anything that would permit independent operation. In my defense I think the phpBB interface is really very ambiguous on this point.) Therefore, search hasn't really been broken per se since 3.3.3, probably, there just hasn't been an index until I let the rebuilding process actually complete last night.

I've tried making a few searches, all of which turn up results evenly distributed across the timeline, but tell me if there's anything missing still.
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Jatsko
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Jatsko »

Looks like it works well for me; Sublevel will let you know if there are still any problems, I'm sure. Thanks for the fix!

That raises a question: since I don't know anything about how running a server like this works - when you say "you have to keep the browser window open", does that mean there's a browser window open on a constantly running computer somewhere all the time to keep the forum running, or is that just for adding results to the search index? I'd be interested in knowing the basics of what it takes to run this place.
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Sublevel 113
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Sublevel 113 »

OH
MY
SUBGOD

IT''S ALIVE!
IT WORKS!!!

:O

Thank you! ^^
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ENIHCAMBUS
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by ENIHCAMBUS »

*Searchs and borrows a random post*
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OMG it works indeed, many thanks!
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Vortex
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Vortex »

Wow, the issue was so simple! Glad that it's finally working :D
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Ancient Crystal
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Ancient Crystal »

Jatsko wrote:
06 Jan 2022 15:31
That raises a question: since I don't know anything about how running a server like this works - when you say "you have to keep the browser window open", does that mean there's a browser window open on a constantly running computer somewhere all the time to keep the forum running, or is that just for adding results to the search index?
The way interactions on the web work, generally speaking, is that
  • The client request a page from the server,
  • The server runs code to produce the page,
  • The server sends the page to the client.
Since the forum is ran entirely as a web server, everything the forum does has to be contained within that basic framework. It's simple enough in the case of, say, displaying the front page of the forum. The client requests [www.pastelland.net/forum] from the server, the server runs code (which in this case involves querying the database, which is a somewhat separate entity, for a list of forums, their number of posts, and so forth) to put together how the front page should look, and sends it back to the client.

For posting to the forums the logic is similar. When the user presses "submit", what actually (roughly) happens is the user requests a page containing their post, with the text of the post submitted as part of the request. The server then, in order to serve that page, adds the post to the database, then serves the last page of the thread the post is in. However, this is already a bit of a hack, because other things need to happen when a post is submitted, including adding it to the search index and sending out email notifications, neither of which have anything to do with displaying the submitted post to the poster. Nevertheless, those things are all done as part of the process to display the submitted post for the first time, because it's a webserver and it can only ever do things when responding to a browser requesting a page.

This reaches an extreme when it comes to rebuilding the search index, which is a long and time-consuming bulk operation. Ideally you would just press a button and it would keep running, but it can only do things as part of responding to requests for webpages, and if the client has to wait too long for a page the request will simply time out. The solution, therefore, is to have a page that, each time it's requested, the server rebuilds a tony bit of the search index as part of "putting together" the page. The page then contains a bit of code telling the browser to request the page again, causing the server to index some posts, and so forth repeatedly. Close the browser and there's no longer anything to keep requesting the page, meaning the indexing process stops.

This is obviously a total hack, but as I understand it at the moment it's the sort of thing webservers need to to get around their limitations. Since I have full control of the server the forum runs on, I could install something which runs code outside of the "page request"->"page preparation"->"response" loop, but most forum admins don't have that sort of control - Mateusz probably did not, AK most certainly did not - meaning nothing in phpBB can be built expecting that to be available.
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Jatsko
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Jatsko »

[project removed]
Last edited by Jatsko on 09 Mar 2022 02:14, edited 1 time in total.
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Sublevel 113
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Re: The third administration: Welcome, dev & issue reports

Post by Sublevel 113 »

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I forgot again!

Can I request to be Sublevel 111? ;)
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