Topic: Feature - search of site help content

Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests

Requested feature overview description.

Add a text search option for the content of the site. Maybe just help/guidelines/etc, or maybe include and segregate forum content or even more (e.g. wiki content) in the results as well.

Why would it be useful?

It can be a pain to remember where exactly to look to remind yourself of how to use a particular site feature, or the exact text of some rule or something. And if you don't even know there's something to look for, you're probably way out of luck. We all know how many forum posts there are asking if there's a way to do X or Y, the answer usually being yes, and usually accompanied by a link to a broad help page that has the stuff buried down in it somewhere. A lot of those are probably the result of people not searching at all, but a good search utility would probably at least clip the low hanging fruit of that, and if it were present enough in the UI, would probably encourage more people to try it first.

Example case: I was trying to remember how to sort a search result a minute ago. I knew I remembered someone in some forum post I'd looked at before mentioning the order directive, but I couldn't remember the syntax or the keywords that went with it. I tried searching the forum, but wasn't finding what I was after. So I figured I'd check the help section, which for a minute I forgot how to find because I don't use it much, and you don't get to it by a navigation header that says "help," but by hitting ">>." (That would be nicer as a flyout menu) Already, that buries the info a bit. But once I was there, I was looking for a heading like "searching" or something. Found the cheat sheet after a minute, but not before I stupidly overlooked it and wound up trying to read about the API for a few minutes and trying things that didn't work based on it - on a page I now can't even remember how I got to, no less. If I could have, I would've started at the main nav bar, typed in "sort results" and ideally seen the section of the cheat sheet I was looking for in the first line.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?

Main site navigation/help area

Updated by abadbird

E621 already has a wiki search. Open "Wiki" on the toolbar (?) along the top of every page. Wiki search bar is on the upper left side of every wiki, including the help:home wiki you just opened. Maybe the Wiki search bar could be changed to say "Wiki Search" instead of just "Search", so a user is less likely to confuse it with a post search (and ignore it). That initial search query will be a title search, as in the wiki's title, and you will be taken to the https://e621.net/wiki page listing your results with the "Show Search Options" fields expanded. From there you also search the (text) body of wikis.

Both title and body search are fuzzy searches, so they also find near misses. That means a body search for animated is beyond useless because the search also lists all wikis that say "anime" or "animation". At 30 results per page, and 55 current pages plus 3 results on the 56th, that's a cool 1653 search results for animated. Really doesn't help that some people seem to have a hard-on for redundantly explaining that any given tag is for "images and animations"... A standard (i.e., ordered by last updated) body search for order does list the e621:cheatsheet on the first page, but only because it was edited a few months ago. As an aside for finding the cheastsheet, any https://e621.net/post page is one click away via the (Search Options) link beside Search above the search bar.

The wiki search is functional but could use some iteration. For instance, filter by tag type is sorely needed. Meta wikis (i.e., the ones linked to with [directory]:[title] syntax) should probably be pushed to the top of search results or split off into a separate search for "meta and help pages".

Updated by anonymous

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