Forum search fails with a 504

One of the most basic rules about posting in a forum is to search to see if someone's already posted what you want to talk about. ... but the search is busted, so I can't search to see if someone has posted a report about search being broken. 🙃 Here's the relevant technical details from the Cloudflare error page: Gateway time-out The web server reported a gateway time-out error. Ray ID: 4b9af4f4cb7ec5d2 Your IP address: [nice try] Error reference number: 504 Cloudflare Location: Newark

... and your emoji are broken, too, evidently. That box is supposed to be  U+1F643, UPSIDE-DOWN FACE. Before you ask, yes, they work in my browser, yes, they work in every program on my computer, they only break on roll20, they work on other webpages.

Hello Chris N., Sorry to hear that you have encountered this issue with searching the forums. Can you provide us with the text you were trying to search for?

For my earlier post about subscribing to application threads, I tried things like 'apply' and 'applying'. For this, I tried things like 'search'. :)

The search function on the Roll20 forums is notoriously... quirky. Here is a Stupid Trick for accomplishing this task. (plus the post after it)

That ... works. Kind of. It won't find newer things (for some unknown--and potentially changing--value of newer), so it's not really a valid workaround. It would be best if roll20's own search function worked, because, as I said in my post about application threads, roll20 is the source of truth (i.e. the software creating the data to search) so roll20 should be the authority on searching it. Beyond that, Google can't be told how to search more specifically than a site's own search can, e.g. only this forum, only posts made (not edited!) on this date, only posts by this user (false positives come up on quoted posts or posts mentioning the user, and that just devolves into uselessness if the username is a common word). You can kluge it, again, kind of, but I've found that kind of thing isn't entirely reliable. Between the forum search being broken and campaign forum threads not working like the less ephemeral general forums, I begin to wonder if the forum code could use some love in general. edited to add some details and clarify a bit

I can't argue. Just trying to present an option. The forum searching has always been less than optimal.

To find things that you've  posted in the main forums before you have access to the replies or topics via your profile ... while I agree that the forum search needs to be improved, this may be a slightly quicker way to find the things that you've commented on or started a conversation about :)

I'm familiar with the view topics / view replies (though they're utterly busted for recruitment forums as I've posted elsewhere). Not really very helpful in the case where I wanted to search for... the recruitment forums being busted. :)

Yeah, sadly that is a limitation with the current system... I kinda hoped you'd posted in the LFG subsection of the main forum and not in the aforementioned 'busted' bit lol. +1 to this known issue getting fixed!