<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
Hi:
<p>Neil Ward wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE><tt>I haven't used eGroups for searching yet, but
I can confirm, from searches of the text files, that there are a lot of
topic-relevant messages that aren't in the FORT database. I've also
found, when searching on spells and charms, that I had to take into account
misspellings of Priori Incantatem, Fidelius and Imperius etc. With
McGonagall, I ended up searching on McG or Minerva, as so many people either
couldn't spell her surname or avoided it.</tt></blockquote>
Yes, I'm now not sure that Trina entered her topics into FORT. I
think she may have unsubscribed from this group already too. I would
advise using Trina's separate file, together with FORT & double-checking
with the search features.
<blockquote TYPE=CITE><tt>Perhaps the eGroups search only looks in the
title and first few lines of</tt>
<br><tt>each post? Perhaps the other FORT messages you saw didn't
mention 'Lupin'? I'd try Marauder, MWPP, Remus, Moony and werewolf as well
as Lupin.</tt></blockquote>
I do know that it's searching more than just titles & the first few
lines of text. But, searching is a bit difficult in that you need
to search for obvious misspellings and variants (I searched fanfic, fan
fiction for example).
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>
<pre>If you notice what the highest message number we have is, you'll see it's 7815. Clearly (to me) eGroups has
set an arbitrary search scope of 5000 messages. Unfortunately, we didn't test THAT aspect of the
search mechanism before declairing "They've got a seach mechanism!" Who would have thought.
What to do? They may not be aware of this. Some programmer may have put in that "magic number" just
because he tought he/she needed something.
Perhaps once Penny returns home she'll agree that as a minimum we should alert eGroups to our findings.
Cool, we've found our first test for the responsiveness of eGroups!!!
At any rate, this is currently not an issue for the HP4GU groups at large. Perhaps eGroups can be
persuaded to look into this before it becomes one. Until then, it looks like the text file will be needed
to ensure complete results.</pre>
</blockquote>
It does sound as though I should write to egroups about this issue.
I do think it could easily become an issue for the HPforGrownups group
in that we've posted close to 1800 messages in just under a month.
<p>Paul -- can you send me the URL for the text files again? I know
I downloaded the first batch but I'm not sure I ever got the last ones
as by that point, we had the egroups Archive up & running.
<p>Margaret -- I think we can work around your desire to not read Book
5 spoilers & rumors. I like Neil's suggestion that maybe we can
designate a group of several people who can update all the FAQs solely
for rumors, predictions & spoilers for the later books.
<p>Off to write a note to egroups!
<p>Penny</html>