Prior to the recent forum change over, we were able to search the forums for posts by select words, and by user name. However, Williamsn, one of the site admins for Renderosity has stated in recent thread : " This was an executive decision made by the admin team. Only admins, moderators, and coordinators can search by author. You can, however, search through all of YOUR posts by going to "my stats" and clicking on "view user's posts"." He also stated in another thread : "Disallowing search by username was NOT a matter of paranoia. It was based on the fact that when the old forums had a search, users really WERE hunting down other users and harassing them. It became a serious problem that partially led to the decision to turn the search off altogether. Remember that, while ten or twenty users being harassed isn't that many in 30,000 forum users, it IS a big deal when you have a much SMALLER number of moderators to deal with the problem. And we have less time to spend monitoring other areas of the forums when we spend so much time policing harassment. This was not my decision. Ultimately, I agree with and stand by the decision that was handed down to me, but it was not my decision to make. Originally, the new search allowed searching by username, but it was decided that it was best left a mod/coord/admin feature only." In that same thread, he added for clarification: "No, no, no, i'm NOT saying it was closed BECAUSE of the harassment. I'm saying that, from what I was told, that contributed to the decision. But the MAIN reason, yes, was bandwidth. It was slowing things down tremendously." *********************************************************** When I search for something in a forum I depend on certain things to help me find what I'm looking for: 1. Thread Name; (*Has been fixed and is waiting to be added) 2. Remembering approximate time period the thread was created; 3. User Name; 4. Key words from the thread subject title or remembering something posted within the thread itself. The purpose of this thread is to poll the forum members, the ones who depend on the search function, as to how they feel about the ability of being able to search by user names other than your own. Please, keep it civil. State your point without flames.

I personally want "search by user name" reinstated. This community has what? 200,000 plus members? I can't believe that a decision was made based on the actions of a few. Instead of banning the offenders, a vital part of the search function was taken away from us, the members. To me that is not acceptable.

It does help to be able to search for a user name, like ockham for python scripts and dr geep etc etc.

I want "search by user name" reinstated! I used it alot.

"But the MAIN reason, yes, was bandwidth. It was slowing things down tremendously." Does that mean nothing to you? So you prefer a slooooow site? Funny!

duhhhhh......That has been rectified with the change over....

I want "search by user name" reinstated too

Me too, I want "search by user name" reinstated

Ummm....whats up with the polls?? AFAIK, the PTB have not decided it was up for debate..something tells me that they are not going to reinstate 'anything' just because a few are unhappy with the way things are run on this new board.

A search without a "Search by username" and a "Sort by date" function is absolutely useless. I cant believe that Renderosity is willing to throw away years of collected knowledge and expierience just because they cant handle a few trolls. And NO, a proper search engine like any other website has, would NOT slow down the site.

I agree with stahlratte It's a pretty lame way to solve a problem: there is a problem, let's remove the tool !

Quote - ""But the MAIN reason, yes, was bandwidth. It was slowing things down tremendously." Does that mean nothing to you? So you prefer a slooooow site? Funny!"

A search is a search no matter what your looking for. Searching by username won't use anymore bandwith that searching for anything else.

Quote - ""But the MAIN reason, yes, was bandwidth. It was slowing things down tremendously." Does that mean nothing to you? So you prefer a slooooow site? Funny!"

If you go to the thread where he said that, and read it in it's entire context in relation to a post directed to him, you will see that he was referring to when 1/2 of the search function was disabled prior to the change over. He stated in that thread that it was originally turned off prior to the change because of some members harassing other members. Someone replied back stating that the reason we were given was that it was affecting the speed of the site and that it was going to be turned back on after the forum change over. Then Williamsn stated further that it was speed that prompted them to turn it off prior to the change, but the harassment was also a deciding factor. The change has taken place. The speed issue has been resolved. We were told it was all going to be turned back on after the change over, and now we find that an "executive decision" was made to keep it disabled for members because of the harassment issue. Basically we were blatantly lied to for many weeks prior to the forum change over.

Not much use having a search engine if it doesn't include by User name. It's usually the only way to search for those tidbits of knowledge that are so generously shared within the forums. Progress, I think not!

Cyber-bullying is an increasing world-wide phenomenon. The case of the Star Wars kid for instance was just settled out of court in favour of the poor kid whose video taped antics with a light sabre was spread all over the internet and had over 70 million downloads. It seems to me the amount of work needed for the mods and coordinators to police the few rotten apples is the real reason for the decision, and not speed. So, I understand their issue. However, that being said, I would be in favour of reinstating the "Search by Names" because I would hate to think that a couple of dozen bullies could reduce the quality of our experience here at 'rosity. I'm sure there's another solution here.

There is all that stuff about "sticks and stones..." too. From the various age threads, I'm assuming we're all adults here. When I go to a forum I take along my own personal ignore button with me. If I see someone acting like a twit and trolling me, usually I just tune them out. Sometimes I bite and give them a run for their money and leave them curled on the floor in a fetal position sucking their thumb, but for the most part I just ignore them. It's not that difficult. Heck, a couple weeks ago someone in the poser forum called me a "Whore" when I disagreed with them. Did I cry and run to a moderator, no. This isn't Kindergarten School and my Mommy doesn't work or post here :) Instead I just shook my head, wondered about the mentality of the person and moved on. It's become an inside joke now between me and a few fellow members. There is no need to punish the rest of us because some can't control their impulses, and others can't just ignore the trolls. I live by the motto that you can't change what people say or how they act, but you can certainly change how you react to it all. That's why I'm at a total loss when I see people getting all bent out of shape over what people say to them on a discussion forum. I just don't get it.

When I opened old rendero forum, I looked at the answers which some of my friends made to existing threads. I am interested in their comments - gives me hints. The new forums lost much transparency, by not showing the list of replies below the thread's title on forum's main page. If you disable the search for persons, too, forums will be "post only, no read, no lookup". New technology should mean progres. Couldn't we first : have the ways and means, which offered the old one, and then, second : add new features ? If you take away features and tools, many will go elsewhere. One can't decide, to change 3oooo people's behaviour. Thank you Gerhard P.S. example : I searched forum for the comments an artist made, to indicate this thread to a newbee, who got questions of that kind. Results : nadazero, gone. No way to find the artists' posts ? His contributions and comments are lost, forever ? What a sad world...

I would like to see "search by user name" reinstated! I would also add that search results should include the post (or thread) title, and be listed chronologically. Without these features the search function will remain of very limited use to me whether "search by user name" reinstated or not.

Turning off search by username isn't going to have much effect on reducing the server load. Why ? Because more searches will be required to track down the thread being looked for. Turning off search by username will not stop people from finding post by specific other users. Why ? Now that text searching within the post text is back, find ing a thread with a specific person in just relies on there being a post with the required username in the text (e.g. "Thanks whoever"). Expect to see "bookmark" replies with mutiple keywords that include a username. What most people do when searching is try to narrow the results as much as possible. A lot of the time you can remember a important participant in a thread and being able to filter by that criteria is important. There's been no mention of Booleans or other advanced search syntax planned, which again would greatly enhance our "Searching Experience".

The search function after the first upgrade was virtually useless and now it is just plain awful. Renderosity, please Reinstate search by user name!!!! :(

Yes, please. RESTORE >>> "Search by user name." Thank you. cheers, dr geep ;=]

ok, I'm callin it... The logic used in the referenced threads and in the statements by this representative of rosity are absolutely true. I can tell becuase, ultimately, they make no reasonable sense whatsoever, and have the spin of unadulterated bullshit in them. Yeah, I'll vote to give that feature back. I'll also say that rather than complaining to normally deaf ears, I'm doing something about my particular feelings about this.

from previoud experience. no point. they will not listen and nothing will now change. oh I vote Yes. make it a proper search. they won't listen tho. the admins will come in, flutter about, say vague bullshit, and that will be it...

Searching by user name is good but I do a lot of searches by key words. Most of the time I haven't a clue who may have posted something I am looking for. Date searching doesn't do a lick of good for me

Dudes...really, have you tried using the standard search to search by a username? I know we got rid of the actual "search by username" option but if you really wanted to find someone, you still can, the basic search seems to work just as well. Just an FYI.

Well, as someone has already done, just put your user name in your signature. I just realized people can easily find my posts using Bandolin. Or is this not the same thing as having a button option that allows you to search by username.

It isn't. Thanks to the combined aspects of relevancy and multiplicity, the results done that way will pull up any mention of that person in any thread. Since there is zero indication (as ever) of what operators are in effect or not, there's no effective way to limit or sort the results according to your criteria. Nah, it's fooked.

I guess I don't understand what it is that folks want from the otpion then. I thought they just wanted to find posts the user has made, either as author or in a reply. I mean, you may have to do a little scrolling until you see what you want but I don't have a prob with that. Like I said though, I guess I don't understand what it is you all want afterall. Thought I did.

"Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it." Oliver Cromwell letter to Walter Dundas, 12 Sept. 1650

What they want is the ability to do a search by author, Teyon, that's all. Not a search that pulls up every possible mention of that author, just the stuff that author, specifically, has done. IT's a standard function of every forum search ever built, becuase the capability, by itself, is critical to the operation of a forum that has any value -- be it for abuse like they fear, or for actual, practical use. A search for you, in the 3d Modelling forum, pulls up threads that you never even replied to. But you are mentioned in them, for example. And, interestingly enough, such threads are given a higher relevancy. Its probaby great programming, but it's crappy policy crippling the capablitity by design. No one would care if renderosity wasn't that important to them, either. The forums here contain information that goes back many years that is, literally, found no where else. Destroying that functionality reduces the value renderosity has to the members in many way...

Oh yeah! My car engine keeps breaking.....let's throw away the engine - it's not like it does anything! I'm with the rest of you. Let's have the thing back the way it was.....!

That's what I thought. So then, my post here is the workaround I thought it was (not the best but it works). I've also made the other mods aware of this thread and my personal views on this. I imagine there'll be a real accounting of the current situation and the effectivness or non-effectiveness the loss of the feature has had. I won't get into my personal view here just yet but like I said, it's a feature I've used sometimes at other sites...never here, oddly enough, until today...

If you wnat to remove the search by name, why not then remove all the posts where some of us contributed something to this community? Forum tutorials - out. Links to external freebies - out. Answers to posted questions - out. I don't remember how many times I told people to do a search on my name because I simply didn't remember in what thread I said something. Besides, if somebody wants to harrass somebody else, what's preventing them from using the members' directory? Will that be next? Return the search by name.

I've used "search by user name" and I'd love to see it reinstated.

I want to be able to search by artist name, because you can't spend hours in a gallery looking for a particular render so you can access its gallery, freestuff and all. Please reconsider.

Come on Teyon, stop kidding. "Search by name" it's quite self-explanatory ! This new forums are supposedly a progress They should, at least, do the same thing better. It's far from being the case.

If you know a user's name, you can search by artist in the gallery. Don't think we've ever been able to do that in the freestuff though. Member's homepages will allow you to see all this eventually, so again, if you have the name already you'll be set once that part of the site is carried over to this part. Still though, I can understand where you're coming from. Really. I understand that it's self explanatory. However, as I have stated time and again, the general search allows you to do it. You may have to scan through some excess but until the admin make any changes to their decision, it's the best way. No need to call me out, as I'm actually not trying to argue you down. I'm just trying to get you to see there are alternatives to a direct approach.

Freestuff, galleries, memberlist, store -- basically, you can search by member name anywhere in the site and get relevant results. Except the forums. The Workaround isn't a workaround, though. A workaround would accomplish the same task -- it doesn't, because the relevancy isn't present. The "hits" are too varied and great to be truly useful. In a different thread it was pointed out that google and other services use the same basic features, ut it failed to mentiont hat they filter those results further -- without the filtering, which the username only bit is all about -- the results are useless. Sorta like googling "Poser" and only trying to find clothing for Victoria...

Okay. I guess its not then. Well, nothing for it but to wait and see what the admin decide.

One thing I should note, on my part, is that I have no interest in seeing the "old" forums return. What I would like to see is the functionality of the old forums return. Unfortunately, the problem with renderosity is that its still the beta testing grounds for the software that Bondware sells. It will be a while before that functionality level is returned, and, like most things, the administration of the site and the owners will simply be as quiet as possible and hope it all goes away.

so if you're having "issues" with cyber-bullying (so bloody lame .. we have a cyber-everything now..) rather than slapping the ever loving @#$^ out of your ENTIRE user base why not try wat most actual forum moderater do... 1) Create a user group called "banned" or what ever you like. 2) set the group permissions to not allow read or write access to the forums. 3) when you get a case of lameness assign this user to this grouping and voila .. this user's account can no longer post to forums to harras other users. Many forum moderators will set users in this "banned" grouping for temporary points in time accompanied by a pm telling them what has been done, why and for how long. Sort of a "time out" if you will. If the issue persists then after fair warrning you ban the users account and ip address from the forums or the site as a whole. I ave used this practice in several forums i've run and found that it worked rather well and my actual time spent dealing with trolls was limited to a short period of time locating them and a few clicks to ban-group them. It really takes not all that much time, AND your entire userbase doesn't feel bitchslapped by your admin team with an accross the board decision based on a handful or so bad apples. With as long as 'rosity has been in business you'd think youd learn effective PR skills. By the way if you can't tell i'm for returning the site functionality of search by username as well. Edit: the comment about counting plunder was a bit overboard...

Quote - "Ummm....whats up with the polls?? AFAIK, the PTB have not decided it was up for debate..something tells me that they are not going to reinstate 'anything' just because a few are unhappy with the way things are run on this new board."

True that, I still can't change me colors! I still have to go begging like the red headed step child at a family picnic in order to get them changed. And a whole whole lot of folks griped about that one. So I say I have to go beggin, leave the search function as it is too. Edit: Although I must admit that the fact that I rarely use the search function might, just might, make me a bit apathetic.

"...the beta testing grounds for the software that Bondware sells." Who do you expect to buy this piece of crap? It's slow, primitive and buggy. There are already plenty forum packages wich are fast, versatile, working properly and regularly updated. It will take eon before Bondware can even reach their level.

Searching by user name will INCREASE the speed. Why? Since the user ID is a separate field in the posts table. A search function that first looks up the userID for a user name (fast search, only 300.000 or so records in that table) and then looks up the posts in the posts table by UserID (fast search, looking up by a integer numeric is very efficient) is much, much more efficient than a full text search over all the post contents. Especially when the userID field in the posts table is indexed. Anything that reduces the need for full text searches and "WHERE < string expression > LIKE < pattern >" will speed up the site. There's only one downside. By indexing more fields, updates and additions to the table will slow down. On the other hand, I expect that the number of database searches far exceeds the number of additions/updates/deletions, easily by a factor of 10,000 or more. Not a real problem. I'd love to see the "search by user name" functionality reinstated. In fact, I'd love to see as many "search by" options as possible, preferably with AND and OR clauses. That would both speed up the searches AND give the user the most relevant results.

Would it be feasible to just ban the people who search by user in order to harrass? One of the best ways to learn Poser is by doing a search on people like svdl, stewer, ockham, geep, etc. They don't all post a lot, but when they do it's usually something significant and/or helpful.

I'm for search by user name - it's a function of every other php forum I use and they certainly have less content than these forums and the only way to find some threads is because you can remember who posted them.

The problems associated with Trolls and Banned Members are thus: We ban them, they create one or several clone accounts and continue their practices. We could ban them by IP address but, IP addresses are not unique and this would ban hundreds of potential users, and even if they were unique, a cursory search of Google would tell you how to change your IP address.

If it were site speed we wanted to address, instead of kicking an older server to the street, it could be kept, and used for forum archives. When exhaustive searches are performed by users; it would bog down the old server where all forum posts older than one week are kept.

As for the issue of users being treated as though they were a bastard step child on Fathers Day, when it comes to "what and how" Renderosity works, Mods and Coords are treated no differently than users. We are simply larger mushrooms on the same farm.

Really though it's to be expected; what is happening to Renderosity is called the Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle
a.k.a. Screw Up & Move UpThe Peter Principle works thusly:

Peter is hired at a large corporation where many workers hide and collect a fair salary, except Peter is a motivated individual, so he performs his duties exceptionally well, and gains several promotions until he begins to fail at his tasks. Blundering ineptitude finally prevails and Peter is no longer promoted, doomed to finish his career in silent disdain.

The short version is that Companies, like people, are promoted to their highest level of ineptitude, their performance levels off, they become complacent and finally fail miserably at tasks and services they once excelled at and were well known for.

Speaking of more than simply the disabled search functions, progress means that successful capabilities are enhanced, not diminished. There were many new forum problems that could have been avoided if Mods and Coords would have been able to test the new Forums while programmers were moving the Market Place to the new server some six months ago. This was suggested, by at least one Mod and Coord, but they were ignored in the condecending manner of S.O.P..

Many of the features which made Renderosity THE PREMIER ARTIST WEBSITE were abandoned. Solutions such as "Here copy and paste this code into your member options," is a poor substitute for buttons which showed you what your background colors, font colors and sizes would look like. We are artists, not programmers.

This whole issue could be summed up with codes REAL Engineers use (real refers to something you can put your hands on, verses bean counters with a fancy title):

K.I.S.S. and The Five P'sK.I.S.S. = Keep It Simple Stupid!

The Five P's = Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

Quote - "Searching by user name will INCREASE the speed. Why? Since the user ID is a separate field in the posts table. A search function that first looks up the userID for a user name (fast search, only 300.000 or so records in that table) and then looks up the posts in the posts table by UserID (fast search, looking up by a integer numeric is very efficient) is much, much more efficient than a full text search over all the post contents. Especially when the userID field in the posts table is indexed. Anything that reduces the need for full text searches and "WHERE < string expression > LIKE < pattern >" will speed up the site. There's only one downside. By indexing more fields, updates and additions to the table will slow down. On the other hand, I expect that the number of database searches far exceeds the number of additions/updates/deletions, easily by a factor of 10,000 or more. Not a real problem. I'd love to see the "search by user name" functionality reinstated. In fact, I'd love to see as many "search by" options as possible, preferably with AND and OR clauses. That would both speed up the searches AND give the user the most relevant results."

You are only partially right here. We are not using "WHERE < string expression > LIKE < pattern >" searches any more. That's why the search is so much faster than it used to be, and how we fixed the bandwidth. There is a special index in subjects, bodies and links called a FULLTEXT index which is basically another file containing every single word in the database, how many times it's used, where it's used, and where it's most relevant. Then we perform a "MATCH (body,subject,link_title) AGAINST (< pattern >)" and it works much quicker and returns a numeric representation of how relevant that row is to what the user searched for. It also prevents someone from search for "rat" and getting "preparation" and "rational" as results ... he only gets "rat" as results. You are right, however, in that there is an index on the userID of each record in the database. Searching by username first finds the userID of that user by searching the member table (takes about a second) then returns every result in the threads/messages that matches that userID (takes about two-five seconds depending on how many posts that user has). It's very fast. Speed is not why we aren't allowing username searches (previous messages will explain that). I have some ideas that may allow us to bring back username searching. I'm presenting those to the people who make decisions and we'll see. NO promises. But of course the forum users are who are must important, because you're the people using these every day, so I'm going to do what I can.

Solutions such as "Here copy and paste this code into your member options," is a poor substitute for buttons which showed you what your background colors, font colors and sizes would look like. We are artists, not programmers.

I said it in another thread, but I'll say it here. This is temporary. Eventually, we will have buttons for you to change things. But fixing things such as the search feature and speed issues are at the TOP of our priority list. Thus we came up with this TEMPORARY solution so that you would still be able to change SOME things so that the forums aren't as hard on your eyes as so many of you are complaining about. Eventually we'll have a GUI-based ability to adjust how the forums look for you. But for right now, this is better than not being able to change anything at all while we fix other issues.