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Forum search is critically impaired to the point of un-usability

There have been at least 6 previous posts regarding the subject of the lack of functionality available in the forums here.&nbsp; (I'm not sure if there are more, as the search functionality is critically impaired). The most recent post I was able to find that contained any indication of official notice was&nbsp; <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/5408768/" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/5408768/</a>, &nbsp;posted in Bug Reports &amp; Technical Issues over a year ago.&nbsp; In that post, the author presented the case regarding forum-search usability politely, eloquently, and clearly in layman's terms, and as far as I can determine, the analysis advanced there is still accurate over a year later: nothing seems to have changed. As a professional database administrator and web developer, I am appalled at this state of affairs for the following reasons: Users have been requesting improved forum search functionality for over 4 years. It's been over 320 days since the last official notice that I can find was taken of users' issues with forum search functionality. There are under 6,790,000 posts. All of the forum posts have a permalink feature that clearly identifies a unique index for each post. It would take a very simply coded screen-scraping algorithm, limited to executing one permalink page-load request every 2 seconds, under 160 days to fully index that many posts in an independent database. It would take less than 8 hours to assemble a web-app, leveraging AJAX and JSON to seamlessly replace the existing search "feature", that would search the resulting database (with at worst equivalent-to-current matching capabilities) and return the permalink indices for any matching posts on the existing Roll20 forums ordered by descending index, at a cost of under a penny a day to maintain. I can only speculate that any associated development time and/or costs would be at worst slightly reduced by having developer access to the system infrastructure, codebase, database(s), and servers that already run the forums. Inasmuch as enough time, since official notice of the complaint was registered, has passed to twice-over deploy an independently-operating solution at negligible cost, I felt that a more technically-focused analysis of this technical issue might be warranted. Please note that, in compliance with proper web-service nettiquete (and several possible interpretations of the Terms of Service), I would never build and deploy such a system myself in the absence of authorization to do so, and I would discourage others from doing so as well; I merely cite this information to provide a (fairly pessimistic) appraisal of a nearly-worst-case method of addressing the repeated requests for forum search improvements in order to contrast it with the absence heretofore of even any indication of any such forthcoming action.
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Edited 1536615862
Kenton
Forum Champion
Translator
Thanks for taking the time to bring this up, and while it might not feel this way from behind your keyboard, I know those feels. Most of the Roll20 team use the forums every day. Thanks for your suggestions, I'm personally adding your points to requirements we're gathering. We're excited to get Forum Search (and other social features) functioning as we'd like to see it in the near future.
As a web developer who's part of a few small-team/big-scope-projects, I do understand the nature of limited resources, project requirements, and developmental prioritization.&nbsp; There are plenty of parts of my projects about which I am also appalled and yearn to change them if only I had the time, so I do appreciate your attention and response.&nbsp; (I also know very well indeed how far away the "near future" can turn out to be for features/fixes whose return-on-investment is so very difficult to calculate...)&nbsp; Thanks very much, and keep up the great work!