Search screen layout suggestions

[a_reader2003]

--- In HPFGU-Catalogue at yahoogroups.com, "annemehr" <annemehr at y...> 
wrote:
> It looks good.  How I think it would look in its final form is that
> the table on screen 3 (the mock-up you had for Fudge) will be *very*
> long in many cases 

Carolyn:
Just a quick interim reply here, but I have asked Paul and apparently 
we may be able to narrow initial searches, so you get less results. 
Eg, search on Fudge AND OOP, Ch8 for example, or Snape AND Sirius.

Possibly may even be able to search on 3 criteria at once: X AND Y 
AND Z. However, mechanism for doing this is still being thought about.

> 
> Rejecting duplicated ideas, of course, will leave us with much fewer
> posts in a table.  The problem, of course, is deciding what's 
similar enough to be a duplicate, and what's different enough to 
warrant inclusion.  But we were always going to have that problem.
> 
Carolyn:
Now this is why I thought you'd all jump enthusiastically into 
discussing the reject categories ! It does seem to me that we will 
have to develop some rules for rejecting posts that put up precisely 
similar points to things that have gone before. This gives all the 
glory to older listees, of course, but that's too bad. The trick, 
however, will be spotting when an old thread suddenly starts to have 
a new spin.. and deciding what to include of the thread to make sense 
of this.


> Unfortunately, I'll bet a surprising number of people don't bother 
to use this, but the ones who do will no doubt be amazed at how much 
has been written about anything you can think of.  I do still think 
it's worth doing for the people who are going to make use of it.
> 
Carolyn:
Well, its another string to the bow for the elves. I'm hoping that 
they will invent a new rule for rejecting posts from newbies who self-
evidently have not tried to look anything up.

> I, as someone with no technical clue, have a technical question.  
How much harder or easier would it be if we sorted posts into all the
> subcategories of screen 2 (i.e. down to the level of individual 
names of MoM members in your example) and then have that group of 
posts be searchable by any keyword the searcher would chose?  For 
example, if you want to find posts discussing when Fudge and Harry 
interact, you get to screen 2 and click on "Fudge, Cornelius Oswald" 
and a search function comes up.  You enter "Harry" and click on 
a "go" button, and every post we've sorted into the "Fudge" category 
is searched for the word "Harry" and the message numbers (and names?) 
come up automatically.  

Carolyn:
Hopefully the dual-search idea explained above will achieve this. In 
your example here, someone would search on Fudge AND Harry and get 
only the posts which we had coded up with both those characters. This 
refinement will need to be designed into the suggested screen layout 
I put up.

I think this would be more end-user friendly and
> *maybe* less work for us as we wouldn't have to actually *sort* the
> posts any finer than to the level of Screen 2.  Meaning that *we*
> wouldn't have to separate the Fudge-and-Harry posts from, say, the
> Fudge-and-Dumbledore or Fudge-and-LMalfoy posts.  I just don't know 
if
> that's technically possible (I'd think it must be, though), or how
> easy or feasible that would be to set up.  I don't even know if I'm
> making myself clear!  ;-)

Carolyn:
Alas, I think it won't find the right posts unless we had coded them 
all up properly. Thus, we had given various posts the primary 
code 'Fudge', but then added various secondary codes such 
as 'Harry', 'Dumbledore', 'OOP Ch8' for instance. This sort of fine 
coding will narrow down searching to speculation on what was going on 
between those characters in the Hearing scene in OOP in this case.

Of course, we wouldn't always have to have all these subsidiary 
codes, but the option is there to use for complicated posts. And I'm 
thinking Magic Dishwasher here: it looms, smiling grimly at me on the 
horizon.
> 
> One last consideration: if we could do what I just suggested, we're
> going to have to standardise the names somehow.  If an end-user is
> going to search a category for "Voldemort," either they would also
> have to search for "Voldie" and "LV" and "VMort" and all the other
> variations, or *we* will have to insert a line somewhere that lists
> all the proper names for people, spells and things.  Like "Avada
> Kedavra" for "AK," etc.  Not to mention correcting misspellings, to 
be thorough.  I notice Barry has taken to refering to Salazar 
Slytherin as "Sally" these days <looks askance>. 

Carolyn:
I think our coding will deal with the initial problem, in that any 
post we deem to be about Voldie, LV, Vapor!Mort etc etc, will be 
firmly labelled 'Voldemort'. However, this will be a problem when and 
if free text searching is made possible on the site (at the moment, 
our tech team is treating this as a secondary enhancement). Perhaps 
there is some cunning way that the dbase can be told to recognise all 
variations on a name, and find what you want all the same. Hm. Dunno.

> Anne
> who hope we can get through this before the book 6 avalanche comes
> out, but still thinks it's worth it

Courage, mes amis.. it will be wonderful.. pauses uncertainly, hoping 
that it will.