Page 1 of 1

Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2025 10:42 am
by thatkeith
I'm trying to find the current best-practise advice for building/signing/etc standalones, but when I search for "standalone" I get the following (grammatically awkward) message: "The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: standalone."

I assume there's an admin-editable list of these words somewhere. Could this please be edited to allow search terms that forum users are likely to use?

k

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2025 3:59 pm
by stam
You could try searching for "standalones"

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2025 7:05 pm
by jacque
Or add an extra word or two, like "compile standalone" or "build standalone" or "problems creating standalone". I suspect the block list is auto-generated by an algorithm.

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2025 8:09 pm
by SWEdeAndy
Yes, it's probably simple statistics - words occurring above a certain frequency threshold would cause too many hits, which this ancient forum framework couldn't handle. But I find the search function generally crappy anyway, so I always just prepend a google search by "site:https://forums.livecode.com" to make Google search the site instead.

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2025 9:56 am
by thatkeith
SWEdeAndy wrote:
Wed Jan 15, 2025 8:09 pm
I find the search function generally crappy anyway, so I always just prepend a google search by "site:https://forums.livecode.com" to make Google search the site instead.
Perfect! I'd forgotten about this trick, thank you.

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2025 10:05 am
by richmond62
'prepend': that's a new meaning of that word to me.
-
SShot 2025-01-16 at 11.05.49.png
-
I think I would tend to use 'prefix'.

Mind you: a good trick for searching. 8)

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2025 10:07 am
by thatkeith
jacque wrote:
Tue Jan 14, 2025 7:05 pm
Or add an extra word or two, like "compile standalone" or "build standalone" or "problems creating standalone". I suspect the block list is auto-generated by an algorithm.
:( The search process seems quite greedy, in that it returns results for each word in the search term; adding words to "standalone" still doesn't seem to help find that word. Including + before the word 'standalone' doesn't help either. Fortunately a site-specific Google search seems to be an effective workaround.

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2025 10:16 am
by thatkeith
richmond62 wrote:
Thu Jan 16, 2025 10:05 am
I think I would tend to use 'prefix'.
Interestingly (to me at least), prepend is a verb, the action, and prefix is a noun, the thing being 'prepended'. So when people refer to prefixing (as most people do, including me) they – we – should be saying prepending.

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2025 10:39 am
by richmond62
Well: I have always thought of 'prefix' both as a noun and a verb (contect dependent), and 'prefixation' as the noun for the process of prefixing a prefix to a word.

Similarly suffixation.

Some linguists who study non-Indo-European languages have developed the term 'infix' for languages that plonk syllables in the middle of words to signal grammatical or semantic changes . . .

Re: Can the 'common word' search term lists be edited?

Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2025 9:29 pm
by FourthWorld
thatkeith wrote:
Tue Jan 14, 2025 10:42 am
I assume there's an admin-editable list of these words somewhere. Could this please be edited to allow search terms that forum users are likely to use?
Klaus and I have only Moderator permissions, and I haven't seen that option for us. Might be good to ask support AT livecode.com.

PHPBB once ruled the world, but seems to have become content to ceding vast swaths of the market to newcomers like Discourse. PHPBB has many oddities out of step with the modern world, like good presentation on mobile, spam mitigation, and of course search refinement.

LC Ltd seems to recognize this, and for LiveCode 11/"Create" they're using a new Discourse system at https://discourse.livecode.com/