After the upgrade to a new version of the forum software, one of the most aggravating things has been how slow old posts from before the changeove to the new version (ie before Oct 15th 2008) have been made available for search.
Old posts has for the last two months been made available for search at a rate of about 4 days of history for each day of processing. A few days ago the oldest post found by searching was from April 2008.
Looks like the people who handle the forum software have made a breakthrough in indexing - I today find posts way back to january 2007 - a major improvement in search capability.
A very nice Christmas present from Bergie and his computer people!
Many thanks to the MRR computer staff on getting all the old posts on line again.
When the new site started they told me that we would have all the old posts in time eventually, but we would just have to wait. So I waited patiently and they kept their word.
Clicking on “Last” (page) at the top of the MR general forum, it looks like the oldest posts are from january 2001.
Searching for some common phrases, I get posts way back - oldest i spotted during a quick test now was 2004 - there may be older posts available for search too.
But it means that reindexing is now proceeding very rapidly, and the rest ought to be available very soon.
A huge improvement to the glacial pace things have been processing at for the last two months.
Makes me very glad that Bergie went back to the developers and had them take a new look at the problem - it seems that whatever they did just now was quite a few orders of magnitude more efficient than the first solution tried (where 4-5 days of history was added every 24 hours of processing, and it looked like it would take about a year of processing to get back to the 2004 posts).
Smile,
Stein - happy to be able to dig out interesting stuff from the old posts again