Please improve your forums! Advanced Search sucks

[theodan]

The "Advanced Search" is not very advanced at all.  A forum for developers that doesn't support features like phrases, boolean searches, boosting, proximity searches, fuzzy searches, etc., is pretty useless.  Also, an Advanced Search screen should have a "Search Tips" link telling the user which search features it supports and how to use them.

 

Please look into using Jive Forums (check out Quartz Scheduler's forums as an example) or some other mature forum technology that supports these basic features.  Otherwise, users:

1. won't be able to find answers to their questions

2. will get very frustrated and their opinion of your product will suffer

3. will keep asking the same questions over and over, thus taking away development time from your developers that could be better spent working on the product

 

Thanks,

-Dan

Post Edited by theodan at 05/30/2009 20:52

[swood]

The Advanced Search in the forums comes from the underlying Fireboard forum software. It is what it is.

 

I would suggest using the server wide Google based search.

 

 

Sherman

Jaspersoft

[theodan]

I know "it is what it is".  That was my point. : )

 

Using Google with a "site:jasperforge.org/plugins/espforum" term can help sometimes, but it doesn't show the title of each thread in the results, instead displaying "JasperForge: JasperServer Project Forums" for all of them.  Also, the results themselves are not reliable.  I search for "misfire" on your forum, and I get 10 results.  With Google I get 0.

 

The bottom line is that open-source technologies are at least half made by their communities.  You guys are busy developing, so the documentation can't be completely thorough.  The "Ultimate" guides (we've bought 2 of them) are fairly basic, and are of almost no help when you're running into bugs, etc.

 

The best source of info in these scenarios is your forums.  And the fact that Fireboard's search is absolutely pathetic takes away a lot of power from your community.

 

Please consider upgrading your forums to a better software package, and please treat search as the most important feature when deciding on one.  Right now it's like we're driving a Ferrari that can only go 20 mph.

 

Thanks for reading,

-Dan

[djohnson53]

theodan,

Thanks for your feedback.   The Jaspersoft Community website has been rebuilt relatively recently and we're working through many of these issues now.  We are aware that certain functions need improvement, like the search.  As you might know, as new features and functions are implemented in a system, there can be regressions and other types of unforseen complications.  We've recently noticed a couple of regressions in search that we are trying to address. We expect to make significant improvements over the next few months.  Please hang in there with us.