** 09/11 MAJOR FAULT WITH SEARCH ( SOLVED 24/11 ) **

MSE_James

Our forum software suppliers are continuing to work on this issue - we'll post here if there is a more substantive update.

Thank you for your patience.

(The search fault is also affecting our usual forum team routines for finding interesting stuff on the forum, so we're keen to see it fixed too!)

One-Eye

jessicar said:

Is there any workaround for this? As an end-date competition person, I'm finding it impossible to find the relevant competitions.

Far from perfect, but this google search might help you...
"E: 15/11 Win" site:forums.moneysavingexpert.com

... it does rely on correctly formatted titles, the order of results is very random, and it will bring up previous years comps (selecting "tools" and "past year" will help)

BootsMullery

jessicar said:

Is there any workaround for this? As an end-date competition person, I'm finding it impossible to find the relevant competitions.

Instead of searching, you may be better off using the "Sort" function.
At the top of the forum you can see a "Sort hot" or Sort new" button depending which version you are currently using. Click on this and select "Closing Date" (or use this url:  https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/competitions-time?sort=closing-date). This puts the forum in Closing Date order. You then need to select the highest page number from the list at the top of the forum as the list starts at the furthest future date and works back to "today"
You can then just work forward on a day to day basis.

There used to be problems with posts getting repeated but if you are using the green tick/red cross buttons you can easily ignore any you have already marked. This leaves the main problem being when a poster may have set an incorrect Closing Date but this is not very frequent.

MSE_James

The developers at our forum software provider are continuing to work on this issue. 

jessicar

BootsMullery said:

jessicar said:

Is there any workaround for this? As an end-date competition person, I'm finding it impossible to find the relevant competitions.

Instead of searching, you may be better off using the "Sort" function.
At the top of the forum you can see a "Sort hot" or Sort new" button depending which version you are currently using. Click on this and select "Closing Date" (or use this url:  https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/competitions-time?sort=closing-date). This puts the forum in Closing Date order. You then need to select the highest page number from the list at the top of the forum as the list starts at the furthest future date and works back to "today"
You can then just work forward on a day to day basis.

There used to be problems with posts getting repeated but if you are using the green tick/red cross buttons you can easily ignore any you have already marked. This leaves the main problem being when a poster may have set an incorrect Closing Date but this is not very frequent.

Hi, Thanks but I tried this - as it was my previous workaround when the Search wasn't working when we first moved over to this site.

But for some reason it's not working for me at all this time around - using the Sort function by Closing Date, I'm not seeing many recent posts and literally nothing for today. I don't know what's wrong but I can't do any comping at all right now.

Will try One-Eye's suggestion.

Thanks all.

BootsMullery

jessicar said:

BootsMullery said:

jessicar said:

Is there any workaround for this? As an end-date competition person, I'm finding it impossible to find the relevant competitions.

Instead of searching, you may be better off using the "Sort" function.
At the top of the forum you can see a "Sort hot" or Sort new" button depending which version you are currently using. Click on this and select "Closing Date" (or use this url:  https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/competitions-time?sort=closing-date). This puts the forum in Closing Date order. You then need to select the highest page number from the list at the top of the forum as the list starts at the furthest future date and works back to "today"
You can then just work forward on a day to day basis.

There used to be problems with posts getting repeated but if you are using the green tick/red cross buttons you can easily ignore any you have already marked. This leaves the main problem being when a poster may have set an incorrect Closing Date but this is not very frequent.

Hi, Thanks but I tried this - as it was my previous workaround when the Search wasn't working when we first moved over to this site.

But for some reason it's not working for me at all this time around - using the Sort function by Closing Date, I'm not seeing many recent posts and literally nothing for today. I don't know what's wrong but I can't do any comping at all right now.

Will try One-Eye's suggestion.

Thanks all.

That sound odd. After sorting by Closing date, pages 89 to 92 of the results give me 76 competitions ending today.

One-Eye

Now ONE WEEK since the problem was reported.

Thanks to the MSE forum staff who were on to it pretty quickly and have kept us updated, even though they seem to have sparse news themselves.

It seems it is the service from the developers that is truly diabolical. Service this bad would normally be making headlines on the main MSE site with the supplier being called out. Is it time to get the big guns aiming at the supplier?

JustJMD

It looks like URL searches are working again, so as long as the full URL are included in the post anyone posing should be able to avoid duplicates.
There are lots of recent results for "DUPE" 
I don't thing "E: dd/mm" searches have been fixed yet, and I haven't tested if the urls on historic posts are shown, but for me this fix is the most important aspect.

One-Eye

JustJMD said:

It looks like URL searches are working again, so as long as the full URL are included in the post anyone posing should be able to avoid duplicates.

I see no change.

Searching www.beautybible.com gives 3 "non-reply" threads that all have last amended dates since 09/11 (thus matching my observation in post #4 of this thread) followed by only threads with replies from before 09/11

A more extreme example can be seen searching for (MD) which returns 144 results - the first 92 being single post threads all amended since 09/11 followed by 52 threads from before 09/11 that all have replies. (MD) should find maybe a thousand results.

MSE_Laura_F

Hello there,

I'm really sorry the search issue is dragging on.

We've had some back-and-forth with our developers as they try to work out a fix. I wish I had a more specific update for you at this time but I'm afraid there isn't much else to pass on. I or one of the Forum team will post again next week with an update.

Sincere apologies for this ongoing problem.

MSE Laura F