Smilie Search Beta

[livius drusus]

The gentlemen have done it, y'all: the smilie search feature (http://www.freethought-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=422) is now installed for beta testing. That makes all y'all beta testers. Ain't it grand?

Okay, so the deal is this. You can do the old fashioned thing and load categories just by picking one from the list and clicking search. You can search within a category by picking it from the list and then entering a keyword in the second field and clicking search. You can search all categories by keyword just by leaving the category as "Any", entering the search term into the keyword field and clicking search.

Please keep in mind that at this point, the search checks only filenames, smilietext (the word after the colon that gets converted into the graphic) and descriptions. I'm only about halfway through fixing the descriptions to eliminate all random numbers and French/German abbreviations, so you might not get what you're looking for with a keyword search at this point.

One caveat: searching for keyword "smile" will get you a pretty heinous motley crew because "smiley" is in so many filenames, regardless of whether they're actually smiling.

Explore at your hearts' content, and please post here if you encounter any problems or having any suggestions for our industrious duo. Worshipful praise is also acceptable.

JoeP, vm:

:appl: :10: :bow2: :appl:

[Ymir's blood]

Hmm, there are three smilies that match the search term "girl"
:girl: :flex: :nail:

and one that matches man.
:man:

At first I was going to complain about sexism, but on second thought that ratio seems pretty good... :wink:

[livius drusus]

He he... The bows in their hair make them girls; his tie makes him a man. That's just the way of the world, my friend. Meanwhile, we'll see if the ratio remains so felicitous once I'm through renaming the descriptions. ;)

[freemonkey]

hehehehe, I found some cute ones in less than 3 minutes.

:homage: :dramaq: :feedingbirds:

Maybe I found a bug.... I entered the word "cat" and got a whole bunch of non-cat smilies.

[livius drusus]

Maybe I found a bug.... I entered the word "cat" and got a whole bunch of non-cat smilies.

Yup, that's definitely buggish. There's no "cat" in the filenames, smilietext or descriptions of those results (except for the one actual :cat:).

Good catch, freemonkey.

[viscousmemories]

Thanks for the tip, freemonkey. We thought it was a good idea to let people search the category names as well as the other fields, but we were wrong. The smilies that came up when you searched were all in the voCATions category. :)

I've removed the category search part for now, we'll see if Joe can think of a way to put it back without such things occurring, if need be.

[Ymir's blood]

:whup: :chucks: :3dkick: :bonk: :hatsteal: :spank:

/gratuitous smilies

[livius drusus]

Wait. You searched for "gratuitous" and those are the only ones that came up? You're about a thousand short by my calculations.
:pointless:

[Ymir's blood]

Wait. You searched for "gratuitous" and those are the only ones that came up? You're about a thousand short by my calculations.
:pointless:
Oh, no. I was wondering if "I've removed the category search part for now" meant that we couldn't browse the categories. In order to check, I had to make a reply and upon finding out that it was not so, decided not to waste the replay and all the lovely violent smilies.

:serenade: :kissfrog:

[JoeP]

Thanks for the tip, freemonkey. We thought it was a good idea to let people search the category names as well as the other fields, but we were wrong. The smilies that came up when you searched were all in the voCATions category. :)

I've removed the category search part for now, we'll see if Joe can think of a way to put it back without such things occurring, if need be.
I think we'll leave it out for now. But the problem could also apply elsewhere -'cat' would still match 'catch' if we had such a smilie. The big solution would be to introduce whole-word and partial-word options.

joe

[livius drusus]

Oh, no. I was wondering if "I've removed the category search part for now" meant that we couldn't browse the categories. In order to check, I had to make a reply and upon finding out that it was not so, decided not to waste the replay and all the lovely violent smilies.

:serenade: :kissfrog:

Ahhh... I see now. Did you happen upon my favorite lovely violent smilie yet? :gatlin: Isn't he adorable?

[JoeP]

As a general note to everyone, please be critical :argue: of this feature. :didi: We need lots of feedback and ideas to make it better!

As well as the 'cat' example there are some other limitations we're working on:

- no way at the moment to search for multiple keywords: if you put in 'big grin' you would find :D but not :beloved: even though that contains 'big' and 'grin'. This is easy enough to code for.

- oops: if you search for 'image' or 'smilie' you get everything, because the code search the entire path \images\smilies\filename.gif. Think we'll fix this.

Liv is busily updating the titles (that's the text that appears when you mouse-over the smilie), but if you find one that doesn't have a meaningful title, let us know.

It's not ideal to pack every related word into the title, since it's should be a simple statement of what the smilie means. We have an idea to add an extra field in the database to hold additional keywords. This is complicated because of needing to update all the forms that manage the smilies, but it's doable. Let us know how important you think this is!

joe

[JoeP]

This is odd. All the smilies with 'fly' in the replacement text don't show up for me. I noticed fly2 :fly2: in a pm of vm's, and witchfly :witchfly: when I was looking for an evil witch smilie. They don't show up as broken links, there's just nothing there. And no clickable area in the smilies popup. Same for pigfly :pigfly: and butterfly :butterfly.

Anyone else have this?

The answer occurred to me 0.5s after posting - content filtering in Maxthon "*fly????". Don't know why that was in there.

[Ymir's blood]

Oh, no. I was wondering if "I've removed the category search part for now" meant that we couldn't browse the categories. In order to check, I had to make a reply and upon finding out that it was not so, decided not to waste the replay and all the lovely violent smilies.

:serenade: :kissfrog:

Ahhh... I see now. Did you happen upon my favorite lovely violent smilie yet? :gatlin: Isn't he adorable?

Very cute. I like these:

:slapface: :bully: :spanishinq:

[viscousmemories]

Huh. Maxthon? I know what it is now, thanks to Google, but I can honestly say that this is the first time I've every heard of it. I thought the Windows world was split into 80% MSIE users, 15% Mozilla based and 5% Opera...

[JoeP]

Huh. Maxthon? I know what it is now, thanks to Google, but I can honestly say that this is the first time I've every heard of it. I thought the Windows world was split into 80% MSIE users, 15% Mozilla based and 5% Opera...
Maxthon was myIE2, but I'm sure you found this out. I was an avid Opera user, and still have it for sites where the IE engine mucks up, but the painful fact is that there are just too many sites (a few % but some important to me) that don't work quite well enough in Opera. Maxthon has most of the same important features, a few less, a few more.