(no subject)

[novapsyche]

If you have time to waste spare, take a look at the NON-help I'm getting in response to my question about 13_blackbirds.

Comments

[jennkitty.livejournal.com]

Their answers make sense, but the fact that they only ever include the first 500 communities to list a particular interest is lame and retarded. However, your help ticket will not resolve their return methods.

disappointing. sorry.

[simianpower.livejournal.com]

The only solution would be for them to up the "maximum" search results from 500 to, say, 2048 or higher and then sort by last update. They aren't likely to do that. There's an arbitrary cap of 500 on lots of things on lj, including the number of friends a non-community can have. I.e. my journal couldn't have over 500 friends, but if I formed my own community there is no limit. I think someone back in the beginning picked 500 as a cap for most fields and it's legacy code now.

[rikhei.livejournal.com]

I don't think that is the only possible solution. What I don't understand is why this cap of 500 includes deleted or suspended communities. They could, simply, decide to show the first 500 active communities that match a particular interest.

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

Note that there may be fewer than 500 communities listed when you search for an interest, because the final display does not include deleted or suspended communities.

Are they really saying that's not a bug? I can easily see that happening in my own code, but then I would fix it.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not a bug. But it's definitely not a feature.

[mehinda.livejournal.com]

I understand what they are saying but that's a piss-poor search feature.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

That's my summation.

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

So they are essentially saying that the search functions like this:

1. Find all communities listing the search term as a keyword.
2. Sort them by creation date, earliest first.
3. Remove all but the first 500 results.
4. From the remaining results, remove all inactive/deleted communities.

Which is asinine and not desired behavior, from my perspective. IMNSHO, Step 4 should actually be excecuted between step 1 and 2. Otherwise, after some number of years, a significant number of returned results will indeed be deleted communities, resulting in "no communities found, here's a link to create one." Moreover, my desired behavior would not be to sort by creation date, but sort by most-recent-entry date. That way, communities with lots of activity will float to the top of the list.

If nothing else, at least maximize the chances of finding an active community by running your search as weed-then-chop rather than chop-then-weed. Chop-then-weed is not expected behavior, at least not IMNSHO...

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Moreover, my desired behavior would not be to sort by creation date, but sort by most-recent-entry date.

But that would make sense, Peer. We can't expect that from our LJ overlords.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I know it doesn't solve your keword problem, but I'd be happy to put something up on the "community promo" community to get some more traffic.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Sure! :) I appreciate the thought and the effort.