Bad Links and Page Errors

[DragonAtma]

My apologies; keep in mind that I've never hosted a message board before. Sure, I've run a few, but someone always took care of the details.

And the search is only semi-fixed; see the new sticky.

[James]

There's nothing to apologize for! I realize most people haven't had to sort things like this out so I was simply providing some background information.

Bummer about some words being 'too common'. I get to define what makes a word too common—basically a setting which says if a word appears more than x treat it as too common to index—and it seems, based on what you have said, that words like Han just occur too frequently here.

Unfortunately I have to rebuild the whole search index to fix this, and that takes the server a full day! Talk about trial and error.

I'll be able to have a look when I return home in a bit. It would be good to know some other 'common' terms which we're missing out on so I can, hopefully, find a proper middle ground.

[DragonAtma]

Well, I imagine namehalfs from really major officers would count. Shu, Wu, Wei, Jin, and Han probably would as well.

City namehalfs mostly wouldn't; although some people would write Luoyang and others would write Luo Yang, apparently Luo gets through fine. You'd have to make an exception for Chang An, though, as An is popular for other reasons. Same for You.

I tried the area names Ye and Xu, and both seem to be fine for searching. That must mean not too many officers are famous enough to cause problems; after all, neither Jia Xu nor Xu Huang's name isn't too common to break things.

[James]

I was able to do some analysis on the database to build a good list of common words which shouldn't be blocked and the biggest offenders turned out to be the likes of 'Liu', 'Cao', 'Shu', 'Wei', 'Yu', 'Wu'. Which I suppose isn't all that surprising. What's interesting is that these words appear in as many posts as a wide range of very common English words.

I'm rebuilding the database now, checking progress with a database query which shows me what is blocked, the words I don't want blocked, and how close they are to being blocked. Fun times.

[Sun Fin]

Thanks for all your hard work James! We all really appreciate it!

[James]

Thanks for all your hard work James! We all really appreciate it!

You're welcome.

I'm planning to do quite a bit more right now. Under the previous host it seemed like everything was held together with duct tape and every time something host-related broke I had to do some odd and annoying tricks to get it working again. Recently a really annoying problem which interfered with connections between Scholars of Shen Zhou and Kongming's Archives cropped up, which broke things like updates on the home page and forum links in the encyclopedia. I fixed much of that this morning.

The sites just need some love in general. The code they use isn't growing any younger...

[Lady Wu]

http://kongming.net/encyclopedia/Zhang-Chuan

and

http://kongming.net/encyclopedia/Zhang-Quan

Same person; "quan" is the correct pronunciation.

[DragonAtma]

If you do a search on "other", it returns four of the five neighboring tribes; Wuhuan does not show up, which is likely a glitch.

Also, if you try searching for a chinese character (say, you want to search on 呂 because you want Lu 呂 officers, but not Lu 陸 , Lu 魯, Lu 路, etc.), it claims the search has illegal characters. Maybe that's fixable, maybe not so much. Similarly, a search on "Lü" is rejected.

[Mitsunari]

Not sure if it's been posted, but Guo Huai's external SGZ biography link is as dead as the dodo.

[Aygor]

External links in the encyclopedia to biographies hosted on 3kingdoms.net and threestatesrecords.com appear to be dead.

Does anyone know whether that has been the case for a long time, and what is going on with these websites?
If the links are dead for good it may be better to remove them unfortunately.