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So what becomes of these drafts? After writing a thoughtful post explaining a technical issue, I hit what I expected to be the button to post it...and then got a message asking if I wanted to save it to drafts. Figuring I had hit a wrong button, I told it yes...and now I can't find the draft to get it posted. This is not a very intuitive thing. I am on support forums and bulletin boards all the time, and this is the most confusing setup I have encountered to date.

It's not really that difficult, in the post reply screen, click [ LOAD ] and select your draft.

No offense but that's only apparent after you've been told what do do... it's certainly not intuitive to find.

Ok I see now. Since a post you start is only relevant to the thread you're replying in, you'd only find it when you change your mind and come back and try to reply again.

Not something I'd have come up with on my own without being serious about wanting to find it.

You also have an overview of your drafts in your user control panel. From there, you can load it into the reply form for the relevant topic. Seems all quite sensible to me (and the UCP was the first place for me to look when I thought, where would they put a central access into my drafts, so I'd say it's quite intuitive too).

On the one hand, I think it would be nice if you could just save drafts to be loaded into a reply to any topic (especially if you have to moderate a board it is nice to have canned replies). On the other hand, if you frequently use the drafts feature, it's probably a good thing the drafts are tied to a topic, because it helps you keep your drafts organized.

Eelke wrote:You also have an overview of your drafts in your user control panel. From there, you can load it into the reply form for the relevant topic. Seems all quite sensible to me (and the UCP was the first place for me to look when I thought, where would they put a central access into my drafts, so I'd say it's quite intuitive too).

On the one hand, I think it would be nice if you could just save drafts to be loaded into a reply to any topic (especially if you have to moderate a board it is nice to have canned replies). On the other hand, if you frequently use the drafts feature, it's probably a good thing the drafts are tied to a topic, because it helps you keep your drafts organized.

Yes you are right but 99.9% of users are not moderators on the forum and there are very few "very active" or "highly active" forums and on other moderately active forums mods can reply to all threads individually or even can save a draft on their PCs. Not a big deal I think..

Let's not turn it into a discussion of how to effectively moderate a forum and what tools to use I personally would like to use this feature for canned moderator responses, but that's well outside the scope of this topic

... Why not just only hit the "Submit" button, and you do not have to worry about the drafts

The forums search doesn't work. Can it be fixed, please?

This is causing major problems for me (and I expect others) -- namely, I can't fix problems with my Joomla sites if I can't search the forums for solutions.

Let me again say that I understand what people like the Joomla Team go through, integrating others' code (in this case PHPBB and/or whatever search system is bolted on), and supporting a large user community. I feel your pain.

But please understand my pain. I came here this morning because one of my sites has the dreaded "You are not authorized to view this resource" on the frontend login (despite the misspelling of 'authorized' in the 1.1.15 code). But when I search the forums for this string or loose keywords I get ZERO hits. In SMF the search results would have been lengthy.

I've fixed this login problem a dozen times in the past, but despite my posting to J! forums and describing my search issues on the new forums search systems, all i get in response are "well, I like the system", "it has it's problems", "give it time", and "well, why not post your questions?"

I've been trolling Joomla forums for approx two years and I've always been able to find answers in the forums. Responses like "well, why not post your questions?" is like saying that the contents of the forums don't need to be searchable, which of course is simply untrue.

Here is what I've noticed:

1 -- A search for "you are not authorised" ("authorised" or "authorised"), with or without quotes, with subject and message text selected, in General Questions, General Questions - 1.0.x, Administration - 1.0.x, Tips & Tricks, and The Lounge, --> gets ZERO hits;
2 -- A simple search for a few terms in the Subjects only often produces a LOT of hits but with none of the terms in Subject, but perhaps with some them in the content;
3 -- Since the results list shows just a wee bit of each post's content, I have to open a mess of hits to see the context of the terms match. (Recall that SMF showed a good bit of the text for each hit, so a quick scan of the hits would give us a good guess of which posts were worth reading) -- with code it's all about context;
4 -- In advanced search, selecting which boards to search is ridiculous. There are 350+ selections in a nine-line window. If you don't know exactly what I'm referring to here then perhaps you've never been to that page. Can we alteast re-layout that page to give us a 50-100 line textarea box?
5 -- If queries are quoted, use hyphens, or select specific post-fields to look in -- there's just no rhyme or reason to the results. For example, again, I search on "css img content", with or without quotes, choosing All terms, and Title only, and the engine returns hits whose titles don't contain all the terms, usually none, but might contain the terms in the post body,but that are not surrounded by whitespace (I didn't use "*" wildcard) -- e.g. does it expect me to form a query as a regular expression?

C'mon, this is TOTALLY BROKEN! I probably sound like an a-hole, but as you can see I've been registered a long time and haven't ranted about anything before now. I'm not a newbie... I'm not stupid... I RTFM... I search before asking... I/we need to be able to find answers that are without a doubt in the forums somewhere, but can't be found.

And finally, I think it's dangerous to force people keep asking the same questions over again because this will lead to a monstrously huge forums database that will eventually implode.

Jaz

I'm going to say, again, that this is currently being worked on. It's a custom search modification, and the programmer is apparently aware of the issues and working on it.

The Google CSE search at the top works just fine for complex search strings and returns a decent result for me. Especially for whole error phrases, I use the Google search anyway. I am often found searching for error strings directly in Google and not even bothering with the CSE... my answer is sometimes found on the site of a 3rd party developer.

Oh no, not again...

Search is really dead now?? It is working well for me but lot of users complain about similar things on the forums.. What happened again with the search function?

tusker wrote:Oh no, not again...

Search is really dead now?? It is working well for me but lot of users complain about similar things on the forums.. What happened again with the search function?

It works just fine for me.