tl;dr— Comments search works again. It is much, much faster. Also search keywords for comments now only search for the whole word.
This all began forty-eight hours ago. The WPD server was down, I'd already broken out the bourbon (as is customary when your server is down), and someone was trying to search for comments containing the word china. Comments search always was slow because we used to do an exhaustive search through the full text of all 2.2 million comments on the site. But, man, china was even slower than slow: it was grinding the site to a halt for minutes at a time. We don't normally log search queries, but china was so slow it was crashing the server, which showed up in the crash error message.
It was 2 AM, we were busy dealing with WPD, and I wasn't exactly sober enough to debug, so we disabled comments search until we had time to look at it. The next day, a dozen of you let us know comment search wasn't working. A dozen-minus-one of you didn't scroll in the bugs thread to notice that's what everyone else was reporting and we'd already explained why.
Anyway, it's re-enabled, and it's a lot faster. china takes half a second, not two minutes. This comes with some minor changes in functionality. First, word substring searches don't work on comments now—carp only finds the exact word carp (or Carp), not carpathianflorist or escarpment (this probably breaks nwordcountbot; sorry @geese_suck). Also, I have no idea what
"exact search" syntax with "s does any more; probably just guarantees you get zero results. Report weird search results here and we'll iron it out soon. Just wanted to get comment search back online.
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There are seriously users here who need to search for and reread a comment made by another r-slurred user months ago? Why? Do you really need to see that Cirno post again from 6 months ago?
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I used it to find a post about Japanese tweets I didn't get to finish reading the other day
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I used marseysearch trying to find a post I made on reddit years ago. Turns out I imagined making that post, but I found that I'd generated so much content that I've already forgotten. I can just peddle it as being new here as long as nobody checks the expiration date. It'll be like cleaning out my refrigerator by unloading everything from 2019 onto a stupid neighbor.
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That's just being a lazy dramatard imho. I don't want post dated expired drama the lolcows have long moved on or died from AIDs by now.
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i sit down and re-read all of my comments all of the time. i like to look at
@SERGE's greatest hits to waste a few hours away.
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You can just visit your profile page, nerd.
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I also have a list of my favourite snappy quotes and i like to see what replies they get when their turn comes around - my favourite one is this:
anyway im bopping rn:
ILL SEE YOU WHEN YOU GET THERE - IF YOU EVER GET THERE
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Ma'am we've been over this before. You need to stop.
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I used it to find the "escape from Predditor Mansion" art post so I could post it on PCM, and then the "Marsey in her room" and "Marsey the country cat girl" posts when they asked if there were any similar pictures.
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