Bad Links and Page Errors

[Korin]

I'm not even sure what that website is it anyways? Is just a place to store images, or something? Or is a solid community like LordYuanShu?

About hotlinking, I actually can just upload a image to imgur in seconds since I installed a plug-in for Firefox that can allow me to do that, so I probably won't hotlink anymore.

Xanga, okay thanks. But is it probably dead nowadays?

[Yang Dayang]

Am I the only one who can't access the main site's index? I get this error when I try to visit the main page with any browser I have.

http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh28 ... 3148f8.jpg

[James]

You are not. It is being worked on.

[DragonAtma]

The forum search seems to be broken -- every search seems to give zero results, even searches for terms that appear everywhere, like "Liu".

Unfortunately, statting officers for IA can't be done until that's fixed.

[James]

The forum search seems to be broken -- every search seems to give zero results, even searches for terms that appear everywhere, like "Liu".

Unfortunately, statting officers for IA can't be done until that's fixed.

Statting officers for IA?

Upon initial research it appears this problem is due to the server's global ft_min_word_len setting, which on our current host may be set to 4. That means search will not be compatible with words shorter than four characters (as seems to be the case here), and yeah, that really sucks for Chinese names. Heck, I would love to be able to search two characters but that wasn't possible with our previous host. This is the sort of thing that crops up when you aren't hosted on a dedicated server of some kind, and unfortunately the cost between the sort of packages I can afford and dedicated services tends to be large.

I've contacted the hosting company to ask about this and possible solutions.

[James]

One option currently available is to use Google.

For example, site:the-scholars.com "Li Hui"

Obviously this is not ideal as it doesn't include every post in the database, but it should do an excellent job of recovering subject titles and might help you out with a project while I'm looking into this.

[DragonAtma]

Ouch. Websites sometimes do that sort of thing.

As for IA [Imperial Ambition] that's the game Unfy and I are working on. Statting is giving officers accurate stats -- which requires viewing biographies of them whenever possible (and, of coruse, are sometimes found only on the forum). If I don't do sufficient research, we get situations like RoTK2 where Liu Zhang's stats were 70/50/90 while Yue Jin's were 38/44/41.

[James]

Solving this problem is going to be a bit of a pain, but I'm working on it.

You should probably be pretty good in researching this using Google searches like the one I just showed you, though? I definitely want to solve this problem for everyone. Four characters is pretty reasonable for many forums, but with Chinese names playing an important role in the forum it's a problem.

[DragonAtma]

It's a bit of a pain; Google used to interpret this:

+Liu Bei Yan Zhang

as returning any page with "Liu", prioritizing "Liu Bei", "Liu Yan", and "Liu Zhang", but now it'll assume that the hits on Liu have to be taken from google+. What a stupid decision, Google!

Fortunately, I can make do -- and fortunately your forum hosters should take action when they realize just how many vital people have names that'd get filtered...

And if they followed Google's idea of making Liu Shan the advisor, you can always re-switch servers. XD

[James]

Okay, I think I've got everything fixed. You should now, also, be able to search for two-letter character names as well, which actually didn't work under our previous host.

That said, search is actually using older technology to get this done, so let me know if you encounter any problems.

as returning any page with "Liu", prioritizing "Liu Bei", "Liu Yan", and "Liu Zhang", but now it'll assume that the hits on Liu have to be taken from google+. What a stupid decision, Google!

Some Google-fu can help out here.

For example, try searching for:
+Liu ("Liu Bei" | "Liu Yan" | "Liu Zhang")
(The result must contain Liu, and I would like to see Liu Bei, Liu Yan, or Liu Zhang).

If something like Google Plus interferes with search results:
google plus -"Google+" -"Google Plus"
(The result should contain 'google' and 'plus', but please keep Google+ out of it).

Fortunately, I can make do -- and fortunately your forum hosters should take action when they realize just how many vital people have names that'd get filtered...

And if they followed Google's idea of making Liu Shan the advisor, you can always re-switch servers. XD

Unfortunately in the hosting world, a small account isn't much reason to fuss with settings applied to multiple users. I need some kind of dedicated service to do that, and it costs money. For example, I could have solved the search limitation and used the good search engine in the process if I paid an extra $20/month. It's not a large amount, but it adds up. Some hosts would have taken it to the next step and required a dedicated server (as opposed to the $20/month case for special database hosting) which typically costs much more each month.