I just tried to do a search for the term V!Giles and got hits for every reference to Giles. Should I put quotes around it or can I not search for the "!"?

I imagine that's because the indexing function splits posts up into "words", and one of the keys for the end of a word would normally be an exclamation or question mark.

I'm saying "words", not to do the "I" "am" "not" "ironic" thing, but because I found out very early when playing search engines that What Your Programming Language Thinks Is A Word May Vary, and indeed may vary between languages. Unfortunately we have invented our own ideolect where "Vamp!Giles" is a word, but MySQL doesn't think so.

Which reminds me, ita was talking about the obscure algorithm which determines which document comes to the top in a search.

I imagine it's actually something like the classic:

W(T,D)=tf(T,D)*log(DN/df(T))

where tf(T, D) is the term frequency of T in D. DN is the total number of documents df(T) is the sum of frequencies of T in every document considered or as it called the document frequency of T.

which translates to "the score for the term in the document, multiplied by it's uniqueness" -- it's not just that the term appears, but that it doesn't appear frequently anywhere else, that makes it score highly.

Oh, and Jon -- what's the story with CSS and your sucked-thread design?

I didn't look at the source before to see how the style sheet was handled.

If I understand what you're asking - The format of the sucked thread is such that it only uses a few lines from the external CSS file. I just hardcoded those few lines in the html of the sucked thread. No external CSS ref necessary. :)

I just hardcoded those few lines in the html of the sucked thread. No external CSS ref necessary.

That was exactly what I was asking. I knew you'd have it under control, just wanted to check.

the difference between "Search thread #__" and "Search [thread names dropbox]" is very small.

Because you already convert the thread_id to the thread title all over the board. I should've realized that. I was just thinking of the front end of the page and wanting to type the thread id number in a form instead of in the URL.

Request: can we put a "subscribe to this thread" link somewhere in that opening description of the thread itself? (I can try to suggest a location if it's doable). And can the list of threads in Set Profile be last-first rather than the other way around if we're going to keep all the old threads listed for a while yet?

I agree Michele. I think both those are fairly easy to code as well.

Request: can we put a "subscribe to this thread" link somewhere in that opening description of the thread itself?

I would love that.

By the way, ita, [link] works for me now. Go figure.

And looking at the thread title block, it could be

Natter 5,435: Will You People Never Shut Up?

Once more into the natter breach, dear friends. Blah blah nattercakes spoilerfree blah (Subscribe)