On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 10:27 AM, Marv Waschke wrote:

In gio-speak, I think topics usually refers to threads rather than individual messages

Not usually. Always.
 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 04:05 PM, ro-esp wrote:

What do you mean by "topics"? Threads or messages?

The number sorted on is labeled "Topics".  In gio-speak, I think topics usually refers to threads rather than individual messages. But I could be wrong. I didn't verify.

Best, Marv

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 08:52 PM, Marv Waschke wrote:

Here's a little background on how searches like this work.

good call

The first, and default, is Most Popular. The group with the most members
appears first. The group with the next largest membership appear next, and so
on.

Next is Most Active. The group with the most topics appears first.

What do you mean by "topics"? Threads or messages?

groetjes/ĝis, Ronaldo

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 09:43 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

NEW: Moderator notifications for pending members and pending messages will only be sent to moderators with privileges to approve them.

+1
 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 12:01 PM, Glenn Glazer wrote:

To be even more ;) pedantic, in SQL and similar query languages, SELECT is not the same as ORDER BY, nor are the things selected or ordered.

Exactly!
I'll add that this search page was fine when gio had only a few hundred groups, but a lot of the frustration here stems from the length of the lists now that gio has grown to tens of thousands of groups. Without filtering the list before sorting the results, the result list almost unusable if the search criteria are not narrow, but narrowing the search criteria in a way that will produce a useful result set sorted only by group name is difficult. Outfits like Google have invested millions on millions of dollars in developing searches that return what users expect rather than the criteria they enter. We can't anticipate that from gio, but all the suggestions here point to ways the search could be greatly improved without massive investment.

Best, Marv

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 11:52 AM, Marv Waschke wrote:

The sort order of the results of a search and the search itself are different beasts.

Yes, and hey, have a look at my bug post. That's correct and it looks like the page itself was designed to search (filter) on a term, and then display the results ordered on the user's choice of criterion from among those offered at the left (most active, most popular, newest, name). The bug is that if you select anything besides "by name," and you enter a search term (which the page allows you to do even if you don't select "by name" - it does not gray out the search box), the sort criterion jumps down to "by name" and wipes out your selection. The results are then displayed in reverse alpha (not forward alpha) order by group name. (That's a secondary small bug or inconsistency. If you do select "by name" and do *not* enter a search term, the results, namely all the public groups in existence, are displayed by forward, not reverse, alpha order.)
 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Here's a little background on how searches like this work. Many of the people here are programmers and will find this boring, but if you are not among the cognoscenti, you may find this explanation helpful.

The sort order of the results of a search and the search itself are different beasts.

The search determines which groups make it into the results, the sort order determines which groups show up on top. Sophisticated search engines like Google have complex search algorithms and equally sophisticated sorting algorithms.

As far as I can see, Mark's search method is quite simple: lump together the group name, description, and tags, then look for matches against the search term. When two or more words separated by white space are in the search box, both words must appear for a match, but they can be separated by other words. If there are quotes around the search term, the term must match exactly. For example, if the search box contains [feline lymphoma] (ignore the square brackets)  a description like "lymphoma is a cancer, which sometimes appears in feline pets" will be included in the results. If the box contains ["feline lymphoma"]  , the previous description would not be included because extra words separate feline and lymphoma, and they appear in the wrong order.

The sort order does not affect what appears in the results, only the order the results appear. The gio group search page has four possible sort orders. These only apply when the search box is empty.

The first, and default, is Most Popular. The group with the most members appears first. The group with the next largest membership appear next, and so on.

Next is Most Active. The group with the most topics appears first.

Newest lists the most recently created group first.

By Name is a bit weird. It lists group names in ascii order, which is familiar to programmers, but strange to the uninitiated. Numbers 0-9 come first. Upper case letter A-Z next. Finally lower case letters a-z.

There is another oddity to the By Name sort. At the bottom of the page, you can select a letter. By selecting A, you get all the group names that start with A. Oddly, the names are then sorted case insensitive, i.e. case is ignored and the sort is what most people would expect of an alphabetized list.

Just thought I would lay out what is happening. I apologize for being so pedantic.
Best, Marv

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 12:12 PM, Nick Schweitzer wrote:

Right now, the owner has to forward it to moderators.

If those moderators have chosen to receive All Emails sent in the Owner Email section of their subscription, they'll get them automatically.  If not, they can still read them online (assuming they have permission.)

Duane

That would be nice as well.

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 11:43 PM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

: Moderator notifications for pending members and pending messages will only be sent to moderators with privileges to approve them.

Is it possible for the Pending Notification email to be sent from someone other than the +owner email address? If someone replies to that email, it would be nice for the moderators to automatically get a copy of that email. Right now, the owner has to forward it to moderators.

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 11:56 AM, Duane wrote:

Works fine on the other pages.

I'd also change the hard-coded size="20" parameter to size="0" so the results display (mostly) uses the members setting for items per page (infinite scroll only shows 100 per page.)

Duane

Right! It’s as you posted before, with those clever URLs. That’s all Mark would have to do. My guess is he may just have forgotten to plug that part in. 

--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 09:35 AM, J_Catlady wrote:

It looks like the intention of this page was to allow *filtering* by a search term and *display* the results by one of the four criteria. But it in fact allows the sort only by name.

I did a little digging.  It looks like everything could be made to almost work as you suggest by including the p=xxxxx parameter for the page that you're on (Popular, Active, Newest, By Name) as part of the Search box script.  The only glitch is that the By Name page still returns things as reverse ASCII sort.  Works fine on the other pages.

Duane

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 06:42 AM, Duane wrote:

Although the results ARE reverse sorted by name, removing the "(by Name)" designation on the results page may prevent confusion.

See my other thread with the bug report. When you don't enter a search term and click "by name," it's alpha (not reverse alpha) order so that's inconsistent. Probably the search does display the elastisearch results, but that needs to be fixed.

More importantly, I think we've all been misconstruing the way the search page was supposed to work (or looks like it was supposed to work). We've been confusing "by name" with the entering of a search term, possibly because the page jumps to the "by name" sorting criterion the minute you enter a search term. That's part of the bug report.
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 07:59 AM, ro-esp wrote:

Seems to me that we have a consensus that whoever is doing the search should have the options to get the results ordered by biggest, smallest, newest, oldest, busiest or quietest

And all of that (except for "quietest") I'm 99% sure was Mark's intention in creating the search page. Note that the search box stays available when you've clicked on any of those criteria, as if you were meant to be able to do that. It's just that when you actually enter a search term, the sort selection jumps down to "by name." This seems to be either a bug or a part that Mark just forgot to implement. I've now posted this as a bug in a separate topic.
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 01:24 AM, Curt Gowan wrote:

On the one hand, established group owners want the most active groups to
surface.
On the other hand, the owners of groups that are starting out want a chance to
find their audience.
On the third hand, the operators of a service like LinkedIn or GIO don't want
the first-movers to dominate -- and therefore prevent growth, change, and
innovation on the site.

Seems to me that we have a consensus that whoever is doing the search should have the options to get the results ordered by biggest, smallest, newest, oldest, busiest or quietest.


Is there a reason to worry about people trying to cheat the system?

groetjes/ĝis, Ronaldo

After all the discussion in two other threads about the problems with the "by name" search, I have come to conclusion that the intention of the search page was good, and consisted of precisely what I'd been asking for in the other threads, namely: seach on a term and display the results via one of the criteria on the left ("most popular," "most active," "newest," "by name"). However, it simply contains a major bug. The bug is that you can only search on a term if you display by name. If you try to enter a search term and use either of the other three sort orders, your choice jumps back down to "by name."

It looks like the intention of this page was to allow *filtering* by a search term and *display* the results by one of the four criteria. But it in fact allows the sort only by name.

Within the "by name" sort, the smaller bug is that the display is isorted by reverse alpha on the name instead of alpha and distinguishes between lowercase vs. capitalized names. It should sort by alpha (as it does when no search term is entered) and ignore upper vs lowercase.

If these bugs (the big one and the smaller one) are fixed, all the discussion the other two threads about about the search problems
https://beta.groups.io/g/main/topic/what_is_the_algorithm_for_the/78334723?p=,,,100,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,100,2,0,78334723 and
https://beta.groups.io/g/main/topic/how_to_make_your_group/78422972?p=,,,100,0,0,0::recentpostdate%2Fsticky,,,100,2,0,78422972
goes away except for the suggestion to prioritize groups with the search term in the actual name rather than just the description. That part would be a #suggestion.
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 06:19 PM, J_Catlady wrote:

(1) Simplest quick fix for now: Remove the text "By Name" as a possible search criterion (because the results are not "By Name" relative to the search term anyway) and simply let users enter a term. The search is currently *not* "by name." Only the results are "by name" in the display order.

Although the results ARE reverse sorted by name, removing the "(by Name)" designation on the results page may prevent confusion.

(2) At least change the reverse alpha order display to alpha order and drop the criterion about upper or lowercase because it's meaningless.

It's quite possible that the order shown is the default for Elasticsearch on the database being used, so it's not a matter of dropping it, but adding a new parameter.

(4) Best solution: once a user enters a search term, let them ask for a sort by "most popular," "most active," etc., just as appears on the left now. Essentially, they could click on one of those criteria only, or a search term only, or both.

Then the problem once again becomes "What is the default results order?"  I can only speak for myself, but I seldom go beyond the initial search and usually wouldn't bother clicking on additional options.  There's no way to know which result might be the one I'm looking for, so going through the default list is fine with me.  This is where an Advanced Search button (bringing up a box or page) next to the Search box might lead some folks to dig a little deeper.

Duane