Zotero forums update

noksagt · November 13, 2017

The response should be tuned to be more informative, but it is pretty common to set the shortest word length to 3-or-more to improve performance. I'm not sure whether this forum is active enough that setting that to 1 or 2 would slow things or not.

In case performance would be degraded, the workaround is to phrase your query in terms of longer phrases (as you did in your second query). For example:

https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search="firefox+57"

Rintze · November 14, 2017

@noksagt, ah, thanks.

I would at least expect the search to just ignore the 1 or 2 character words instead of showing no results at all. The current behavior also doesn't work well for people writing queries that contain any short word, instead of just short numbers: https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search=broken+in+high+sierra vs. https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search=broken+high+sierra

fcheslack · November 14, 2017

I think this was mostly our tweaks to try to make searching work better by default (but still work on a DB the size of our forums), where we add a '+' at the beginning of each term if '+' or '-' is not already specified. It seems that was having the effect of requiring terms that were shorter than the minimum length, thus 0 results.

Let us know if you're still noticing strange results.

Rintze · November 14, 2017

Thanks.

Strange:
https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search=firefox+xyzz and https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search=xyzz+firefox : results (only matching against "firefox"?)
https://forums.zotero.org/search?Search=firefox+xyzzz : no results (as expected)

fcheslack · November 14, 2017

Ha, I actually get the response for your post now for those queries.

That's what's expected. I made it only require the term if it's >4 characters. The limits we use for several of these could change.

Rintze · November 14, 2017

"I made it only require the term if it's >4 characters"

Would it be hard to show which terms are being ignored? Or just a warning in case a search contained <5 character terms like "search terms of less than 5 characters were ignored in this search".

fcheslack · November 14, 2017

They aren't ignored, they just aren't required to be in a result to be returned which is the default.

Rintze · November 30, 2017

FYI, in case the Zotero devs ever consider moving away from Vanilla, Discourse offers free hosting for popular GitHub-hosted open source projects: https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/

(CSL got recently approved, and my plan is to both migrate the CSL mailing list there, and also create a subforum for CSL users for style requests and the like, so that people don't have to post here as much for pure CSL-questions)

TESOLTeacher · December 2, 2017

I've seen a few forums move to Discourse. While I didn't like the change initially, I must admit that it is leaps and bounds better than these current forums, especially for projects such as this. Subforums, tags, etc. All would help greatly in identifying and searching for issues.

bwiernik · December 2, 2017

The Zotero forums used to have subforums. They seemed to cause more confusion that help among both users looking for help and Zotero developers and volunteers giving support (e.g., many people posted the same question unnecessarily in multiple subforums). For me personally as someone who responds to many threads here, the switch to only a single forum has been a major improvement.

Rintze · December 2, 2017

(the main things I find lacking about the current forums are a toolbar for applying rich-text/quote/code markup, advanced search, image embedding, and user roles ("staff"))

adamsmith · December 2, 2017

yes. Images and markup would help a ton. Style requests are often awkward as people try to describe where italics are (also making copy&paste to the visual editor harder) and we spend a lot of time telling people what to do with screenshots (and the fact that you can't just paste an image here is a major deterrent to more screenshots getting posted, which experience suggests could save even more time).

I completely agree that getting rid of categories was a net +

Rintze · December 2, 2017

(I should add paste-as-html to preserve rich-text markup as a highly desirable feature)

Rintze · December 22, 2017

One more forum feature request: it would be awesome if people could write their posts in markdown (most markdown is much more compact than HTML tags, e.g. `Hello World` instead of <code>Hello World</code>, and > I think that ... instead of <blockquote>I think that ...</blockquote>). I currently always type these tags out by hand, which is rather time-consuming.

Maybe posts could simply be pre-parsed with a JS library like https://github.com/evilstreak/markdown-js ?

P.S. I thought of this after seeing https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/69552/would-a-gitlab-com-translator-be-generalisable-for-self-hosted-c-ees
P.P.S. @fcheslack previously indicated that he had trouble enabling Vanilla Forums' Advanced Editor (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/261757/#Comment_261757), which has the option of markdown support (https://docs.vanillaforums.com/help/addons/advanced-editor/).

adamsmith · December 22, 2017

Yeah, I'd love that. The html tags are quite annoying, especially for code.

bwiernik · December 23, 2017

Markdown would be amazing.

emilianoheyns · December 27, 2017

another +1 for markdown