Is there a way to go to a thread using only its unique name?

[JenniferMurphy]

I work in Software development, and what you are describing would not qualify as a "bug", but would be an "enhancement" request.
A "bug" is defined as something that is returning an error, or not returning the expected results, i.e. some feature is not working as it was originally intended.
If a product does not have some "feature" you desire, that is not a bug (I would love for my car to fly, but the fact that it does not is not a bug).

With any enhancement request, the questions that are typically asked before proceeding with it are:
1. How much of a demand is there for it?
2. How critical is it?
3. How much will it cost?

I am a retired software developer. I worded for a major software company for close to 30 years as a software developer, a first line development manager, and as a second line development manager with over 50 employees in 4 departments. In that company, if a product did not include a basic capability such as the search facility not being able to find an object from one of its key attributes, it would have been characterized as a bug -- a design bug or an implementation bug -- but absolutely a bug. In addition to your list of questions, we would also ask ourselves if the feature in question should logically be part of the design.

Apparently where you work, the standards are considerably less demanding.

Any good owner/manager simply does not take every request and act on it immediately without any thought first. They have to ask themselves the previous questions and discern whether it is a prudent decision (or not) to make such an enhancement request.

Note that when legitimate "bugs" are found, we do report them to Xenforo.

You have an annoying tendency to put words into my mouth. I never suggested you should "act on it immediately without any thought first". The inability of the search feature to find an object given any characteristic that uniquely identifies it is a bug -- and a pretty bad one at that.

 

[JenniferMurphy]

May I ask why? I'm curious because I personally disagree completely (even had staying on such outdated software been a real option), but I'd be very interested to know what you think is worse about this software than the old vBulletin? My experience of the forum is from a different point of view to yours so I possibly don't appreciate what affects the change has had for those primarily asking questions here, rather than moderating or answering.

For me, it was very similar to when I traded in my 20 year old car for a new version. I did initially miss the 'character' of my old car, but very quickly came to appreciate all the progress that has been made in the meantime.

I should amend that statement. I am not suggesting that staying with vBulletin was the thing to do. As I understand it, it was not longer supported. But Xenforo, or at least the implementation here, has a number of "quirks". Several of them I have previously reported without any action. Here are some that I can think of right off:

1. The Preview button is misleading. Once clicked on, It should change to something other than "Preview", such as "Draft View" or "Normal View" to clearly show the user whether they are in Preview mode or not. I consider this a major UX bug.
2. The "Post Thread" button is even more misleading. Almost every other board I am aware of uses something like "Start New Thread". Until I enter something, there is nothing to "post".
3. If I type a something in the Thread Title field and then click on Post Thread, that title text is discarded without warning. It should be placed in the title field.
4. The bold, italic, and underline icons require a string of text to be selected. With most word processors, simply clicking anywhere in a work will apply the selected highlighting to the entire word.

There are some others, but I can't think of them right now. I quit bothering to submit them here because of the condescending response I usually got. A well run application would make some reply acknowledging the submission and then putting it on a To Do list. That would at least help the submitter to think someone gave a **** and would encourage others to also make suggestions.

PS: There are a number of features that are better now than before and better here that at many other boards. And the community is first rate.

 

[MARK858]

Can't you just type it in Bing or Google. Below is what I get with Bing (The adblocker message is just because of my setup, the link is correct)

 

[JenniferMurphy]

Can't you just type it in Bing or Google. Below is what I get with Bing (The adblocker message is just because of my setup, the link is correct)

Very clever. That works in both Bing and Google.


I couldn't get it to work with the post ID.

So it looks like both Google and Bing thought the thread ID was a valid search string. It's looking more and more like a bug in Xenforo.

 

[RoryA]

Here are some that I can think of right off:

1. The Preview button is misleading. Once clicked on, It should change to something other than "Preview", such as "Draft View" or "Normal View" to clearly show the user whether they are in Preview mode or not. I consider this a major UX bug.
2. The "Post Thread" button is even more misleading. Almost every other board I am aware of uses something like "Start New Thread". Until I enter something, there is nothing to "post".
3. If I type a something in the Thread Title field and then click on Post Thread, that title text is discarded without warning. It should be placed in the title field.
4. The bold, italic, and underline icons require a string of text to be selected. With most word processors, simply clicking anywhere in a work will apply the selected highlighting to the entire word.

There are some others, but I can't think of them right now.

I remember you reporting #1 (IIRC it's a 3rd party editor that we can't change, sadly) but I don't think I've seen the other items you mentioned anywhere before.
2 and 3 I can see could be irritating (as I mentioned, I don't really use the forum that way, so they have never really struck me) so I'll mention them to the forum gods and see if anything can be done, or if we just have to pass them up the food chain to XenForo. Likewise 4 - to be honest, I've probably wasted a lot of time as it never occurred to me in any software that I could do it without selecting the word first.

One of the (many ) nice things about the new software, is that there do seem to be a lot more changes that we can make without fear of them being overwritten with new releases, although obviously there are still many features that are out of our control.

 

[MARK858]

It's looking more and more like a bug in Xenforo.

Or a feature which it has been decided will have little benefit and so got rejected at the project management stage (which would make it not a bug as it isn't doing anything unexpected or unintended).

 

[JenniferMurphy]

Or a feature which it has been decided will have little benefit and so got rejected at the project management stage (which would make it not a bug as it isn't doing anything unexpected or unintended).

Why are you going to so much trouble to avoid calling this a bug or a flaw? If the Xenforo developers actually considered it and rejected it, then they are idiots. If they worked for me, I would fire them. This has to be one of the simplest searches of all time. That data is certainly in its own field, so a search would be just a few lines of code -- possible one line of database code. And if it had a field on the advanced search page, people would make use of it.

I give up. I'm done with this pointless discussion. You can have the last word.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Why are you going to so much trouble to avoid calling this a bug or a flaw?

You can cite as many years experience bla bla bla... It is of little merit compared with the experience of those that are telling you that it is not a bug. Guess what - I also don't know of a single standard that would recognise this as a bug.

You actually raised a couple of good points, but no-one wants to stand by you and support you because you just rub everone up the wrong way. You're always griping about the most pedantic matters (no, you're not a perfectionist, just a sceptic), and you're frequently calling people and institutions idiots. It's become your theme! And we're tired of it.

You can have the last word.

Perhaps. But it won't be long until the idiots at Xenforo, MrExcel or Microsoft irk you about some thing else.

 

[smozgur]

An identifier is solely related to the table relationships and it has nothing to do with the search module because its value is subject to be altered due to possible migration requirements. The identifier, by the way, is heavily used by the search engine to define the entity relations with the other direct or indirect entities, however not saved in the search index because it is not supposed to be as it is not intended to be used as the search keyword. From the search indexing standpoint, it means at least 7 million keywords to be indexed in a database like the MrExcel forum database besides it means nothing without an additional keyword since many entities exist with the same identifier as an unsigned integer. (Still, although it is not designed for that purpose, the powerful bookmark module provides a workaround for the desired action as @Peter_SSs explained very clearly at the very beginning of this thread, or the URL method could be used to access the threads or posts by using the identifier as it is already obvious from the routing system of the software as it was mentioned in the original post.)

Therefore, as the final word for this matter, it is not a bug and none of the developers in the database world would do such a mistake, even if the search module is built on the full-text method in the database directly or by using a search engine.

 

[JenniferMurphy]

May I ask why? I'm curious because I personally disagree completely (even had staying on such outdated software been a real option), but I'd be very interested to know what you think is worse about this software than the old vBulletin? My experience of the forum is from a different point of view to yours so I possibly don't appreciate what effects the change has had for those primarily asking questions here, rather than moderating or answering.

For me, it was very similar to when I traded in my 20 year old car for a new version. I did initially miss the 'character' of my old car, but very quickly came to appreciate all the progress that has been made in the meantime.

After more time using the new forum software, and being able to compare it to vBulletin that is still used on some forums, I must admit that I was wrong. This is not perfect, but is if far better than vBulletin.