google custom search engine. $100 per year for an ad-free version. i am not sure how much is spent per year on this website, but $100 cant be too much if it is a useful feature... then again, i do not think there is much of interest worth searching.

gay. google only allows 20,000 queries per year for $100. so... anyway if all the forum results are stored in a database table, i am sure there is some open source search engine code you can just take for free to index the posts and make them searchable. if it were worth it to do so. which it likely is not.

Really? Am i the only one who thinks it is necessary?
I find it hard to believe.

no, you may just lack the knowledge of a blankflag.
google has this site query that you can use if you are desperate to search the forum for some reason...

try a search like this on google and see what comes up
italy site:webdiplomacy.net/forum.php

I agree with Taco. This forum may actually need to be broken up into a couple sections :1 Diplomacy Related Topics, League/Tournament Related, Debate.
This is 2013, it would be easy to just split the forum up so its easier to find stuff. It makes no sense to force people to scroll thru forum posts 10 at a time to find something

"I agree with Taco."

+1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG3PnQ3tgzY

Someone I have muted (disappeared to quickly to catch who) mentioned google search. It is easy to apply a search engine already written. It is more difficult to write your own. Google has a team of devs and they have a *product* with lots of customers so, yeah, they can sell the product for $100. It is their own search engine that they point to your site. Their extremely powerful servers run their already written and owerful code. We don't have servers of that magnitude and we don't have existing code. So if Kestas cam implement google's offering and someone wants to aonsor the financial commitment I say go for it.

Thats true. Or just break the forum up into multiple sections like every other forum which exists in the world.
I think that can be done for free....

I stand corrected. I think there is a forum in Somalia which relates to womens fashion in the post industrial era which does not have multiple sections.
So we are on the same level as Somalia.

Search isn't that hard to do. You set up a form field and set to text.

We're using PHP here? So the page will be like

$query="Select * from posts where post_body like '%$_POST(search_string)%' or post_title like '%$_POST(search_string)%'";

$result=mysql_query($query);
$i=0;
while (mysql_result($result[i]))
{
echo "<some html stuff> Yr results are: $result[i].body";
}
$i++;
}


That's about 50% of the way there. I'd volunteer to write one except, ya know, the whole video game thing.

@Al, I think any of us could write a search. The problem is writing an efficient one that doesn't bog or crash the system when more then 5 people use it at once.

@jmo

Touche', my friend.

For what it's worth, if I could have anything in a site I would prefer a way to edit posts. That would be grand.

Easy to write, hard on the server and *very* inefficient. not to mention it only finds the exact phrase so if you miss a word in the middle or reorder the words...

You need to build an index table with keywords, threads, post IDs, and then do a cross reference on wo or more lookups.

And a big +1 to the editing of posts, Al!

Issue with editing....Draugnar says "Al has sweaty balls", then Al responds "Draugnar eats shit" then Draugnar edits his post to say "Al is a very nice guy...I wish he would be my friend".
Sure it shows Draugnar edited the post but the original information is lost.

Editing a post would indeed by be nice.

And i would like a virtual cross to nail people on which i dislike.

I would have edited the "by" out of the post but i can't. :P