Exclude Forum Community Discussions in search?

[urukrama]

As this is mainly a support forum for Ubuntu, it would be very handy to have an option to search only in the support forums here. If I search for some terms now, often almost half the results are posts in "Forum Community Discussions" forums, particularly the Cafe and Recurring Discussions.

I can select which forums to search in on the advanced search page, but can only select one support category at a time ("Absolute Beginner Talk", "Main Support Categories", "Forum Archive" and "Other Community Discussions"). It would be nice if there were an option to search only in all these forums.

I am not suggesting to exclude all the forums in "Forum Community Discussions" from searching, as is the case with the Community Cafe Games forum, but merely to have the option to search only for support.

I don't know how feasible it would be to implement this, but it would help forum members (old and new) better find what they are looking for.

[urukrama]

Should I understand from the lack of replies that (a) this is not possible, (b) this is not really important, or (c) this is a really silly idea? :-)

[Joeb454]

It is very much related to the topic of another thread about the option to ignore various forums. Though that may not be search specific.

The best option is to search in the specific subforum :)

[urukrama]

It is very much related to the topic of another thread about the option to ignore various forums. Though that may not be search specific.

The best option is to search in the specific subforum :)

I know you can search within specific subforums, but for some topics you could have to search in more than one subforum. Several of the subforums are also very general (Absolute Beginners Talk, General Help). If you limit your search to a particular subforum, you might miss help that is found in one of these general subforums.

Whenever I search for something now, more than half of the search results are to (often very opinionated) threads in the Community Café and Recurring Discussions. It would be nice if I could exclude (at least) those two.

[bapoumba]

Here is a link to a recent thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1242891
I've asked UG if a feature in use before the last big forums upgrade could come back.

[aesis05401]

Hello,

By prefacing google searches with 'site:UbuntuForums.org' you can use all the power of the google engine and bump UF page rank at the same time.

Hope this helps. The forum search was aggravating for me as well, now I only use it for new posts and my posts. Everything else goes through google.

Edit: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861. This is just the beginning of what you can do, I don't thisnk any single forum is going to outpace the search giants, so it might be better to search through the third party platforms anyhow.

[cariboo907]

I use Google almost exclusively to search the forums, when I first became a member I got frustrated at never finding what I was looking for by using the forum search engine, so I resorted to Google, most of the time the answer to my question is is usually the first or second link.

[urukrama]

Hope this helps. The forum search was aggravating for me as well, now I only use it for new posts and my posts. Everything else goes through google.

Thank you, but that is not really what I was looking for. I know I can search the forums with Google, but in the past the forums search features has always been suitable for my needs. It is only in recent months that I find I have to sort through a lot of irrelevant search results, nearly all of which come from the Community Café or the Recurring Discussions forums. In the past, when I was more active here, I never had that problem (perhaps because the Café has grown? I don't know).

I just noticed that the Community Café Games now also show up in the search results. I thought those were excluded (at least, that was one of the arguments that some of the moderators gave when they explained why the Games did not tax the server as much as the former Other OS Talk subforum, when the latter subforum was closed after the server problems).

If this is primarily a support forum for Ubuntu, it would make sense to exclude all the non-support forums from the search. If you are looking for help to get your sound working, or to help with Openbox configuration, you don't want to continually bump into heated discussions about Linux not being "ready" or KDE being worse than Gnome, but Gnome being worse than Openbox.

Thank you for the link to the other related thread, bapoumba. I'm glad to see I am not the only one who thinks this way. :)

[bapoumba]

Thank you for the link to the other related thread, bapoumba. I'm glad to see I am not the only one who thinks this way. :)
You are welcome :)
I think it could be very useful to people who want to focus on support.

[forestpiskie]

Here is a link to a recent thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1242891
I've asked UG if a feature in use before the last big forums upgrade could come back.

I thought I read something before in here -

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6928115&postcount=6

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1095169