I'm personally tired of being told to 'search for it' when the issue isn't me, its vBulletins stupid search. You need to switch to something that is meant for Q/A for support and have the forums for discussion. Bulletin boards weren't designed for tracking Q/A.

Hell, I know you guys put in a lot of time and I appreciate it, but if you want to solve what I figure to be a giant headache of yours; you need to use the right tools.

http://www.osqa.net/

I agree that vBulletin search is poor. I always do a google search with a site:forum.xbmc.org slapped on it.

Something like OSQA would be a nice compliment to XBMC's wiki and forum.
Although, actually implementing it would take some time from team XBMC, and teaching users to use it instead of the forums they are used to is a whole 'nother issue.

Anyway, I like the idea!

cynicaljoy Wrote:I'm personally tired of being told to 'search for it' when the issue isn't me, its vBulletins stupid search.

There are other resources for search as bradvido88 points out, Google's search algorithm is much smarter than a bulletin board's search, things to keep in mind are Googles search has a massive server farm behind it with millions of dollars invested in the database content and algorithm that drives it, vBulletins search is performed by a php script...

Then there is also the advanced search, if you check the "Sort Results by" drop down menu it contains a number of useful options, clearly the "Last Posting Date" option doesn't return the options you want, perhaps relevancy would be more to your tastes.

You can also set a date range to say the last 6 months to weed out all the old outdated posts... also try selecting an appropriate sub forum to search, no point searching the whole board when you should be searching the Help and Support section, or maybe the Tips and Tricks section...

Just remember the search is only returning results based on what you ask for, it doesn't know what you actually want, that's your job to sift through the returned information.

Must say it would be interesting to see if using OSQA as a way to answer questions would help users, or keep them from not asking it over and over again.

What I am worried about is when stuff gets outdated, this is oddly enough, good in forums as people ask over and over again so the information and the answers can alter.

Another thing I'm worried about is how to track new questions and new answers etc, it looks quite a lot like how stackoverflow is modeled and that site is indeed extremely good when you need answers so might be something to this, however stackoverflow deals mostly with answers (or rather the questions I'm asking there) usually are those which have an answer which is unlikely to change over the years, e.g. how do you do a specific thing in c++ or how is this part of that specification meant to be interpreted.

The wiki is getting out of hand and there have been talks about altering the forum software so perhaps it could be worth trying this out, just as a test and see if it helps.

Cheers,
Tobias