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[chilly_charly]

Nick,

Sorry for the delay, but I just discovered your post while trying to resurrect the Enthusiast list.

The situation has improved, but a number of users can't be accessed using their logging name. For instance there are 8 different Bens !

Before, all the Ben's contributions were returned. The Not-the-right-Ben issue was not adressed since it had a very minor impact on the results. The situation now is much worse.

The star rating is also wrong. For instance, this recent post was rated but appears as unrated using the advanced search (search for Chilly Charly, sort the results by date, it's at 09-21-2006 05:06 PM. Additionnally this same post is ignored when searching for "wire local property", while the other posts are found (well... except my second post ! ...  Is that a coincidence ? Why am I excluded by the search engine ?

And you probably noticed your weird rating status...

[chilly_charly]

Nick

The star rating problem seems to be localized in time : between the 15/08/2006 and the 21/09/2006 none of the replies (mine, tst, jlv, altenbach...) are rated by the advanced search.

[Laura F.]

Hi chilly charly,

I see what you mean.  I'll bring these issues up to our vendor:

1. Only one user returned (such as Ben) in advanced search when there are multiple unique users
2. Missing star rating on some posts when in the search view (I noticed this doesn't happen for everyone such as TiTou) for the time frame middle of August to middle of September. 

I think we still need more instances of this strange search problem that sometimes posts are not returned before we can convince the vendor it is a problem - so far I've seen two, both of which you found.  Please bring any others up that you find!

By Nick's "weird rating status" are you referring to the fact that all of his posts are rated with 5 stars?  I think this is because he, Sarah, and I are Discussion Forum administer.  Please let me know if there was something else you were seeing!

Are there any other issues you see that prevent the E-List from being resurrected?

Thanks,
Laura
Web Support & Operations

Message Edited by Laura F. on 10-23-2006 05:33 PM

[chilly_charly]

---

Laura F. a écrit:
...Missing star rating on some posts when in the search view (I noticed this doesn't happen for everyone such as TiTou) for the time frame middle of August to middle of September.
...
I think we still need more instances of this strange search problem that sometimes posts are not returned before we can convince the vendor it is a problem - so far I've seen two, both of which you found. Please bring any others up that you find !

---

What I see is that during the said period, TiTou has the same problem...

It is rather easy to find search errors : for instance, let's use this reply ("Nick Sorry for the delay...).
The advanced search is able to find it using "chilly charly" as author and "Nick resurrect" as search word. It fails when the search word is "Nick discovered" or other words, single or in combination.

The funny thing is that I didn't succeed to reproduce the problem with other contributors (I tried with tst and Dennis Knutson). I'm afraid the search engine doesn't like me...

[chilly_charly]

Correction : It seems that I'm not the only one concerned.
The advanced search has difficulties also with this tst's post. Found using "tst" and "Forum advanced search", but ignored when "Nick" is used as search word, while Khalid's post below is properly detected.

[Ben]

So how is progress on fixing the bug that broke "The List" going?

Ben

[Laura F.]

Unfortunately, it looks like it may not be a bug that has broken the E-List.  The forum vendor is setup to only allow unique user names.  However, because we have customized our setup to synchronize our forums to newsgroups, we must allow multiple user names because we don't enforce a user name check if some one posts to the newsgroups.  The advanced user search may be truncating the user results to only one user based on the assumption that we should have unique user names.

I have reported this issue and have not heard back about whether they will change the functionality of this back to the way it was previously.

I also reported the issue about some users not having their ratings in the advanced search.  They are still looking into this issue.

Hopefully, I'll get a status update about these issues in the near future.

Regards,
Laura
Web Support & Operations

[Laura F.]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to give you an update:  There are no plans to change the functionality of the search to display multiple user names if they exist, instead of just one user name. The workaround is to use the user ID numbers.

The issue with the missing ratings in the search seems to have remedied itself because I can't find evidence of it happening currently.  There are no plans to investigate this further unless it starts happening again    Not exactly the update I had hoped to give.

The good news is that we realize the importance of the E-List to the community.  We are currently looking into developing a list that does not rely on the UI of the discussion forum.  This way, we are not nearly as susceptible to the bugs (or bug fixes) that have been plaguing us recently.  Also, we are freeing up our community members from maintaining such a list, hopefully giving you more time to spread your knowledge in the forums!  We are very thankful for all of the work that you have done to make this list (especially Chilly Charly) and we will work closely with you to make sure that the new list meets the requirements of our community.

When we are closer to developing the list, I will post additional updates and solicit feedback.

Thank you for your participation in our community!

Laura
Web Support & Operations

[Ben]

Go Laura Go!

Ben

[tst]

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@Laura F. wrote:

We are currently looking into developing a list that does not rely on the UI of the discussion forum.  This way, we are not nearly as susceptible to the bugs (or bug fixes) that have been plaguing us recently...and we will work closely with you to make sure that the new list meets the requirements of our community.

---

"Those who do not remember the past...".

A good idea with a previous unsuccessful counterpart (its last update still has Dennis at a measly 5.5K). Unless such a tool has the same basic data as the E-List it will not take off. You should also consider that some of the popularity of the list comes from CC's posts and the wild discussions following them (the predecessors to the BreakPoint). This will not be available with an automated tool.

Also, if you look through the list threads you should find many suggestions, as well as a tool I wrote which allowed graphing each user's data over time and comparing it to other users. Such a tool should also help, but requires some access to the DB. If someone at NI could write a tool which would be able to access the NI DB (it can be a VI with a removed password) and extract the data in real time, or maybe release a weekly update of the data, that would be nice.