Tried the Search function for a thread I'd tabbed yesterday on DU3 & got 504 Gateway Time-out

[Hekate]

This discussion thread was locked by EarlG (a host of the DU4 Bug Reports forum).

I wanted to come back to read “Sotomayor Warns Reversals May Undermine Faith in Legal System “ so I had it tabbed in DU3. This was just an experiment.

I copied the thread title from DU3 to my open Advanced Search page in DU4.

It went slowly. On the first pass I input date range Nov 14-17, and after waiting got a page full of OPs, none of which had Sotomayor in them.

On the second pass I refined the date as Nov 16-17, checked to make sure I was asking for GD, and made sure the terms included Post Titles. DU4 ruminated longer this time, then kicked me out to the time-out message.

[EarlG]

1. Ah... sadly

I think that has more to do with the rickety nature of DU's advanced search function than anything else. This area of the software has not been changed -- the search still uses the same functionality as DU3. So unfortunately it is liable to produce some odd results.

I was able to sort-of reproduce the problem by searching "Sotomayor Warns Reversals May Undermine Faith in Legal System" with the following criteria:

Search term(s): Sotomayor Warns Reversals May Undermine Faith in Legal System
Post author:
Forum: Main
Post type: Thread Titles
Start date: October 17 2022
End date: November 17 2022

It took a while and then returned a lot results that did not include the thread in question, but the thread was actually there about halfway down the page.

I then tried searching just "Sotomayor" using the same criteria, and the thread popped up quickly.

I think it's because when you use multiple words in the search function it treats them all as separate words, and then searches for ANY of those words that occur in thread titles within the date range. So just searching for "Sotomayor" worked much faster and more accurately because a lot of junk results weren't returned.

Finally, I tried searching for "Sotomayor Warns Reversals May Undermine Faith in Legal System" INCLUDING the quote marks to see if it would search the phrase as a string rather than as individual words. Unfortunately, doing that gave me a 504 Gateway Timeout error.

Bottom line on this one: the DU advanced search function is a fickle beast, and at some point we should get around to making it work better. Unfortunately that is a pretty major undertaking, so it's not something we can really look at right now...

[Hekate]

2. Thank you! My default is to believe I'm doing something wrong...

That’s my personal interior glitch. Your invite to participate has been a good opportunity for me to work thru the issues I have with learning a new interface when the old one has been so simple and intuitive for me, and of such long duration. Currently I have two kinds of tabs open so I can go back and forth, but I’ll get there.