Search Voat v2 beta preview (SearchVoat)

submitted ago by SearchVoat

Introducing a preview of Search Voat version 2 (beta): https://searchvoat.co/v2

  • Search posts, comments and subverses from the same page.
  • Faster search (I hope)
  • Search short words (like "Q")

Coming soon:

  • Alerts
  • Buttons to delete/refresh posts (for when you delete a post on Voat but it still shows up on SV)

Comments, questions, suggestions, objections welcome here please.

dazboa ago

No bold titles.

SearchVoat ago

Sorry, bold titles are an integral part of The SearchVoat Experience™.

Blapta ago

Replace 'edit/delete' with a rescan function.

SearchVoat would have a function of something such as 'rescan' for each link, which would cause SearchVoat to rescan the item of the search result and determine whether it or its author has been altered or deleted.

However, if there is going to be a form for manual entry, it would be slightly better to put it on a separate page rather than operate on it in the list. Also, the e-mail address entry field is unnecessarily short.

SearchVoatBot ago

When you select edit/delete, it does a rescan. The reason for requesting a reason option is (a) to add a tiny bit of friction, to discourage idiots who just want to click "rescan" on every post (I'll do almost anything to resist having a Captcha), and (b) to distinguish between "rescan post" and "rescan user". Rescanning the user, not just the post, makes more calls to the Voat API, and my most important priority is to minimise traffic between SV and Voat.

Blapta ago

You could throttle it. For example: not more than 1 per minute; not more than 5 per hour.

SearchVoat ago

Yes, already doing that.

SearchVoat ago

Oops posted that as my bot.

Blapta ago

SearchVoat can and should become operable without cookies and JavaScript.

SearchVoat ago

It will work without cookies, because the only cookie is "theme" (light/dark).

But it is highly dependent on JavaScript, particularly in "responsive design mode" because of the pop-out menu. It's usable without JS in desktop mode, although some of the buttons and the expando don't work. I agree that it would be better if it didn't need JS at all but that's a lot of extra programming work! So I decided that it only needs to work as well as Voat does. It uses the Voat.co CSS and JS, mostly.

Blapta ago

What pop out menu? The 'edit/delete' link? It would be better to have that lead to a page with only that video rather than do that within the list.

SearchVoat ago

The pop out menu appears with narrow screens, i.e. phones and tablets. Try sizing your desktop browser narrower (with JS enabled) and you'll see it. Most of my visitors use phones.

Voat is largely unusable without JS. You just clicked "reply" to post that, right? JS.

Blapta ago

Feature request: substring search.

SearchVoat ago

I agree this could be useful. I will experiment to see what impact that has on storage and performance, which are severely limited in my case.

Blapta ago

User's text sizes ignored: poor legibility.

The sizes the user has selected for good legibility are ignored by SearchVoat. When SearchVoat uses smaller sizes, it becomes poorly legible. No text sizes smaller than the user configured default should be used. Use the fractions (%), and the units rem and em to size. No sizing in px or pt.

SearchVoat ago

I'm using Voat's CSS, mostly. Do you find that Voat's CSS is working better than SearchVoat's? If so, it would be helpful to have a specific example of text which isn't sizing properly on SV. If not, then I'm afraid I'm probably not going to do anything about that.

Blapta ago

Ability to search for subverses. We need the ability not only to search in subverses; we need the ability to search for subverses.

SearchVoat ago

Ok those changes are working, now, I think. Could you please try it again and let me know if it works better for you?

Blapta ago

Now, If I click on the 'Subverses' button, it erases my search and goes back to the root. (https://searchvoat.co/) v1 search.

SearchVoat ago

That's really frustrating, not sure why that's happening for you. Can you see the results in this link? https://searchvoat.co/v2/?st=subverses&t=politics&nsfw=on

Blapta ago

Yes, that functions and I can also then select the 'search sidetext' box and do that search.

SearchVoat ago

Thanks. I still don't know why you had the problem you mentioned earlier about going back to the root. If you can reproduce that I'd love to hear more about it.

Blapta ago

In the Firefox (current release) profile I usually use, it happens consistently. I tried a profile with default settings and it works as intended. It is likely related to a security setting or extension of mine.

I notice other things. I will post threads for each of them.

SearchVoat ago

Would still be interested to hear the mechanism for this failure. Is it simply JavaScript disabled?

Blapta ago

It appears to work now. I do not think I am doing anything differently. Firefox crashed, so I restarted it. Maybe it was solved by restarting.

SearchVoat ago

Thanks for the suggestion. Currently it searches the subverse sidebar texts as well as name and description, and as you point out, that can give irrelevant results. I wanted to avoid having a side panel on the subverse search page (like there is on the posts & comment search pages) if it only has one option. But I'm coming round to the idea that searching subverse sidebar text should be an option, as well as filtering by (non-)NSFW and (non-)anonymized subverses, so the subverse side panel's coming back.

SearchVoat ago

Every Voat submission is searchable

That's not true any more. I'm not indexing the v/8chan mirror threads, because there is such a large volume of data with so few views/subscribers and anyway I don't consider them to be Voat content. If people want to search them, do that at 8chan. There was some discussion about it here https://voat.co/v/voatdev/3010478.

heygeorge ago

How far back have you archived comments? Is this a work in progress (like submission search was)? Do you intend to head back to Voat’s genesis?

Have you grabbed all of Voat’s/Whoaverse’s submissions to date?

Have you conversed with Putts and do you intend to check/respect when people delete or anon their Voat accounts?

SearchVoat ago

Have you grabbed all of Voat’s/Whoaverse’s submissions to date?

Yes. Every Voat submission is searchable

That's not true any more. I'm not indexing the v/8chan mirror threads, because there is such a large volume of data with so few views/subscribers and anyway I don't consider them to be Voat content. If people want to search them, do that at 8chan. There was some discussion about it here https://voat.co/v/voatdev/3010478.

SearchVoat ago

Thanks for your questions.

How far back have you archived comments? Is this a work in progress (like submission search was)? Do you intend to head back to Voat’s genesis?

I have comments since October 2017 (these are the earliest ones) and will not be collecting earlier ones via scraping or the API, because it's way impractical. The earliest searchable comment has number 10684000 - I'm not going to make over 10 million API calls to fetch all the earlier ones. I've asked Putts for a dump of them so I can have a complete set but so far he hasn't provided one. Now that they're searchable he may be watching feedback and I'm hopeful he may yet agree.

Have you grabbed all of Voat’s/Whoaverse’s submissions to date?

Yes. Every Voat submission is searchable, going back to these earliest ones: https://searchvoat.co/v2/?o=on

Have you conversed with Putts and do you intend to check/respect when people delete or anon their Voat accounts?

Yes. We're discussing this issue. In the short term I'm going to add a "delete/refresh" button to SV to let users flag posts that have been edited, deleted or anonymised, which will make my system refresh from Voat automatically. I hope that will be working within a few days. That's not enough, of course - in the longer term I'm pretty confident Putts and I will work out a process whereby the SV database is synced automatically.

SearchVoatBot ago

This submission was linked from this v/WW2Discernment submission by @Vindicator.

Posted automatically (#33559) by the SearchVoat.co Cross-Link Bot. You can suppress these notifications by appending a forward-slash(/) to your Voat link. More information here.

MadWorld ago

:-) You are the best!! It is goddamn amazing!!

When searching for username, as part of the search text, the result sometimes includes comments belonging to the author, when such term does not exist within the comments. It might be a bug. Examples:

Question, how far back in time can the comments be searched?

Thanks!

SearchVoat ago

Yes - by default, searches will include comments/posts by that user and comments/posts that mention them. You can exclude, or include only, posts by that user by clicking the links at the top: https://archive.fo/GNlPs#selection-305.0-327.1

Comments since October 2017 are searchable.

MadWorld ago

Yes - by default, searches will include comments/posts by that user and comments/posts that mention them. You can exclude, or include only, posts by that user by clicking the links at the top: https://archive.fo/GNlPs#selection-305.0-327.1

That raises another question of consistency. If the username were specified in the "Search text" field, but not specified in the "Posted by user(s)" and "In reply to user(s)" fields, the search result would include comments/posts by that user, where that said user was not mentioned in the comments. So it would list all user comments(20 pages plus date range, if available). But there was only one single page available. Maybe I am missing something...

Searching 'kevdude' by "Posted by user(s)" and "In reply to user(s)" fields also only returned one page[1][2]. Is it because the pagination has not been enabled yet?

SearchVoat ago

That was a bug caused by excluding comments from deleted submissions - if you look at that search again you will now also see comments on deleted submissions and the "next page" button. Thanks for pointing it out.

MadWorld ago

Yay, the next page button is working now! This search feature will be tremendously helpful...

Vindicator ago

Love it, SearchVoat!

I've been fooling around and tried to search a user's comments in two subverses. It gave me errors whether I put a comma and a space between the two subverse names, or a comma with no space. FYI. :-)

SearchVoat ago

This should be working now. Could you please check it for me?

Vindicator ago

Yep. Worked great!

BTW, I was able to use the new search functionality yesterday to dig up some very interesting material buried in the comments of a deleted thread (that shouldn't have been deleted) relating to what may be going on with Julian Assange. Here's the post I did based on it: https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/3153090/17975930

It inspired me to create a new subverse where goats can datamine Voat's info horde on elite globalist corruption: v/WW2Discernment. Hopefully, others will get involved. :-) I put up a sticky based on the v/SearchVoat stickies.

One thing that would be a great improvement for me and help noobs not inadvertently search too narrowly would be the option to change the default SearchVoat setting options to "search post body" and "include NSFW" so I didn't have to open "Options" and click the check boxes every time.

Thanks for everything you do to make Voat great!

SearchVoat ago

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

I've updated SV v1 & v2 so if you search from a NSFW subverse, even if you don't limit results to that subverse, "include NSFW" is on by default. I don't want to include NSFW by default when searching from non-NSFW pages, for obvious reasons.

I've often thought about whether to "search post body" by default. My current feeling is that most people want to find posts about their search topic, not posts that happen to mention it. I may put a message at the end of the results saying something like, "if you didn't find what you were looking for, click here to run the search again including post text" or some such.

SearchVoat ago

OK I think this is working now. Could you please check it for me?

SearchVoat ago

Thanks very much for this. Working on it.

srayzie ago

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argosciv ago

Love it!

Css needs a bit of fiddling in the sidebar on the right, but otherwise over the moon with the functionality.

SearchVoat ago

Thanks! I'm weak on CSS, always looking for help with that...

argosciv ago

Problem solved.

It's not the best solution, but, it gets the job done.

Manually set the height for .radio-inline to 32px.

  • Open the css files for default and dark theme.
  • In each, search for ".radio-inline,.checkbox-inline".
  • Edit to match below:
.radio-inline,.checkbox-inline {
    position: relative;
    display: inline-block;
    padding-left: 20px;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    font-weight: normal;
    vertical-align: middle;
    cursor: pointer;
    height: 32px;
}

SearchVoat ago

Thanks - I tried this and it didn't have much effect, except it increased the vertical gap between "NSFW exc/inc/only" and "Order by oldest first". Stand by while I fix up a way of applying user CSS to SearchVoat (like Voat subverse CSS) which would make it easier for us to share ideas.

argosciv ago

Not exactly my strong suit either, still getting the hang of it.

I'll take a peek at it shortly for you.

Blapta ago

It should use the full width of the screen. Even more important because of taking up space with options on the side.

SearchVoat ago

Thanks - I agree. It was using the same CSS as Voat (which restricts width at 1200px) but I have overridden that now.

cynicaloldfart ago

Cool, thanks. It's nice to be able to search comments.