Forum upgrade: UNICODE

[MagicManICT]

So... the forum doesn't properly support the modern UNICODE standards. There was a post a month or so ago from a user that hadn't been so active recently and had used certain characters in it that weren't recognized. It wouldn't let him post. What were those characters? Emojis. Love them or hate them, they are a part of the standard now.

Not only that, the search function is horrible. I feel like it's 1995 again, and I'm looking for research materials on WAIS.

[shubla]

No modern unicode.


You can use google search, or bing. They both have crawlers going all around the forum.


HnH has very good forums. Relatively lightweight, functional, easy to use. (If we exclude the hearth vault archives that were inaccessible for years)

[synaris]

eh im rather ignorant on this. will such a change prevent me from using asterisks or another characters as i normally do? or will asterisks now italize everything like discord does? fuck that aspect of discord by the way. the people that made it must have never spoken online in their entire life.

i also dont want anything to look different. a lot of forums these days lag like a bitch for no reason. havens' is one of the few that don't.

[ricky]

+1 how can i illustrate The Wall's hammer March without Unicode hammers?

[Granger]

The forum language is English, thus ASCII would be enough. Nevertheless, the forum seems to support enough Unicode for foreign languages - and I (while missing a vomit and loco option for the smileys at times to express my view on certain suggestions in a short form) like it that it doesn't support emojis galore as natural language is more precise in its ability to transport information.

TL;DR: search could be improved (by at least adding the commonly searched for abbreviations to a white list against the word length limit, so we could search for STR,CHA,EXP,...), but fuck no to turning the forum into the equivalent of Egyptian wall paintings through supporting emoji.

[shubla]

TL;DR: search could be improved (by at least adding the commonly searched for abbreviations to a white list against the word length limit, so we could search for STR,CHA,EXP,...),

There are ways to make google search embed in the forum. But I agree that current search has very annoying world limit. Whitelisting bunch of words does not sound like a good solution, but a big hassle. Perhaps lowering the world length limit might work? It is not even that big forum. I don't know how the search exactly works like, and whether lowering the word length limit would greatly impact performance in searches.

[Granger]

The word length limit is to not index the top something short English glue words (this, that, the, ...) to keep the database at a sane size.

[shubla]

The word length limit is to not index the top something short English glue words (this, that, the, ...) to keep the database at a sane size.

Well hello there mr. obvious.

[MagicManICT]

You can use google search, or bing. They both have crawlers going all around the forum.

Sure, and I can dig through all kinds of posts if I want to try to find something specific that I recall from a specific subforum, but don't recall which it is. Google and all the others could use some serious work at indexing forums. Sometimes it works well, other times it's a bigger hassle than the lack of a good built-in search engine here.

eh im rather ignorant on this. will such a change prevent me from using asterisks or another characters as i normally do? or will asterisks now italize everything like discord does? fuck that aspect of discord by the way. the people that made it must have never spoken online in their entire life.

i also dont want anything to look different. a lot of forums these days lag like a bitch for no reason. havens' is one of the few that don't.

As to the first concern, that's a discord thing. Full UNICODE support would mean support for any character in the current set by using "alt codes"--the keystrokes you can use to input any character to a text box whether your keyboard and OS supports it natively or not, typically by holding alt + the code sequence on the numeric keypad. This would mean that all foreign language character sets are supported properly (though I haven't seen a bad post here, I'm not sure some of the Eastern Asia languages are supported properly given we're an 'English only forum) and that all the extended stuff that has been add the last 20 years, mostly emojis and pictograms, would be supported.

For the second, it wouldn't necessarily look different unless a signficantly different software was used. And as far as loading times, some of that is due to the server, some of it may be due to the amount of javascript some are trying to shove through... which slows down the client computer as well as the server overall.

hello there mr. obvious.

Yes, it's obvious to anyone that has a background in software development, maybe not so much to the average user. Still, given the speed of modern servers and PCs, it'd not slow down the indexing much to just have that list of a few hundred words you wouldn't want to index like articles, pronouns, predicate verbs, etc. (If there were a slowdown, it'd be the fairly good size increase to the index.)