- UL7IM4 G33K
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- Senior Legendary Member
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstien
Personally, I find that one of the most valuable tools to a group admin has been removed, and that is the Mass PM system. When a group is 10-50 members, it might not be too bad to copy and paste all those update PM's. But what about groups with 100+ or 500+ members? Can you imagine trying to PM 500+ members individually?
I think that a mass PM button should be added into the admin tools (if it hasn't already, which I don't believe it has). It would make managing large groups infinitely easier as well as improve update quality by allowing more time for that than time spent on just PMing the thing.
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Now, about the search feature. Most anyone here knows how the search feature works... or better yet DOESN'T work.
The search feature scans the entire site (can be scaled down to just the forums... wooptie do) for any and all results that contain the words you put into the search. Sounds effective right? The problem with that is that it searches member posts, names, quote boxes, updates, titles of threads and everything in-between for those words. this leads to some pretty botched up results even when you know what your looking for.
I feel this situation needs to be addressed, since the new motto here seems to be "use the search button" for anyone who is out of place or repeating a topic. The problem might be they already did and didn't find what they were looking for on the first to fifth page of the search.
A way to improve the feature would be to add filters. These filters can narrow the search down to author's name only (allowing for you to find all posts by a specific user), thread title only (allowing you to find specific threads easier), and search post content only (so you can find a specific quote in a post on the forums you wanted).
Not only that, but the search should also prioritize results. So far it is just displaying results rather than giving any rhyme or reason. If it prioritized results with the most words you searched for and the closest string of words to what you searched for it might make things easier.
For example:
Say you searched for "The greatest thing ever about Halo is the wraith". The search would probably just give results for each word and only prioritize ones with more of those words and not them being in any specific order. But with a better search system it would the string of text and not just more words, allowing for the first result to be that specific quote if it does exist on the forum.
Just a few thoughts.