[Forum] Search feature per forum/Advanced Search

Right now, we have a "Search Forum" Field on the main Forum overview page. That's great, but unfortunately not always useful. As examples: I want to search the Looking for Group forum for Pathfinder games I want to search the Suggestion forum to see if a suggestion has already been made (right now that's easy, wait till there are 20 pages) I know I saw a thread last week, not entirely sure what it was called, but I know a few keywords. I know it was either in "Specific Use Questions" or "General On-Topic". The search button will likely not find it for me. In all those cases the Search Feature is more or less useless. Searching for "Pathfinder" as an example showed me, in this order: The discussion about the PF character sheet. Interesting but not what I wanted A "character sheet generator" script from 1 year ago. A PF game (finally an actual game) - from March 2013. Most likely not a game I can still apply to. (Yes, there's the LFG tool, but not the point here. It applies to other searches too) So my Suggestion: Add a "Search this Forum" field to every forum section, and only search that one. Add an "Advanced Search" feature, where you can filter the results by time, forum etc. ( Edit 02/12/15: Not only filter, but of course also sort by time and other criteria. Like "most relevant first" or "newest/oldest first" etc)

Please yes. searching just a single forum is the way things should work unless you tell the system otherwise.

Yes. What year is this? "Advanced" search features should be a no-brainer.

Ahhh I'm happy to see this thread is Open for comments after 3 months. (Meaning Roll20 curtailed the practice of automatically closing these threads after 2 months of no replies.) Endorsing this thread request! I'll be back to add +1 when I get another vote to allocate. I've just posted a related Question on the General discussion board, asking about a method for using Google to search a specific sub-forum.

Gold said: Endorsing this thread request! I'll be back to add +1 when I get another vote to allocate. Likewise, Gold. I think roll20 has grown to a point that it is absolutely necessary to improve forum search! There are too many "near-identical" posts in the threads that could be eliminated with a modecum of search feature improvements.

Ditto. My main issue is trying to filter through dozens and dozens incomplete LFG threads so unless the mods spend more time enforcing the guidelines it would be really helpful to have advanced search. Better yet, something like the reddit enhancement suite so I could set-up a filter and simply not see posts containing some words to make browsing easier.

I posted a similar suggestion, myself, so I'll endorse this as well.

Thanks guys, unfortunately we're still hidden somewhere on page 2... :( So it will be a while till we get pushed to 1 I fear and then maybe, maybe get some more exposure. Maybe if someone sees the link Vince posted in your thread (thanks) we'll get some more support. :)

Ironically i didn't find this post, so i put up a post suggesting it. But have pulled my vote over here so that it can get more traction.

Just shows once more how needed a feature like this is. Thank you

Good Freaking GOD do we need this! Total +1.

Woo, we made it to page 1! I do hope that means some more people will notice it and throw their support our way. Thanks to everyone who supports this so far (and everyone who will in the future)

Do you think this Suggestion would include improvements to the order of Search Results in the forum, as well as Searching By Sub-Forum? Just limiting it to which Subforum shows results would be a huge improvement for findability. But then after that, would be nice to choose between showing "Latest Posts" vs showing "Most relevant keywords". The current search results, I'm pretty sure are not chronological. If you searched for, say, "Pathfinder", even if you could limit it to "Pathfinder in Looking For Group sub-forum", the results still seem somewhat random in the ordering (so very old and out-dated Pathfinder LFG threads are likely to appear at the top & on Page 1). Or say you search for "Jukebox" even if you could limit it to "Suggestions sub-forum", it would still be nice to put the Latest New Suggestions at the top, whereas currently you would find a mixture of old threads containing that keyword coming to Page 1 of the results.

Well, that's sort of included in the advanced search, one of the setting could be time and so on. Although here something as primitive as a 24 hour clock seems to get overlooked, so I don't know how much would I need to spell out...

Yes, I kinda assumed that would be included in the Advanced Search feature. Maybe should have been more clear. I'll edit my OP to include it.

I finally have a free vote. +1 I'm so tired of cobbling together alternative search methods for the site. Time to integrate the search features that have been prevalent on internet forums/sites for over a decade. Please add some advanced search capabilities to the forums. The roll20 community deserves it.

This is on live. There are some polishing touches coming in the next couple of weeks.