Searching forum is PITA for modders

[aubergine18]

The forum search feature treats underscore and hyphen chars as if they were spaces delimiting separate search keywords. Lots and lots of stuff in the modding API uses underscore and hyphen... So when we try and search for anything like that, the forum splits our search term in to separate keywords, and then searches for anything with those keywords = quintillions of bogus search results, even if we set it to "all terms or query as entered".

Would it be possible to tweak the forum search engine so it treats _ and - as normal chars? I imagine this would also need to be applied to the indexing routine as well :/ It would make searching for specific properties, types, etc., much, much easier.

EDIT: Just found that enclosing search term in double quotes seems to give much better results... Maybe some JS could be added to search form so that on submit if it sees any char sequences with - or _ (but not spaces) it encloses them in quotes?

[Adil]

For me, limiting the search range to modding discussion board seems to work tolerable most of the time.

[ssilk]

See eventually viewtopic.php?f=55&t=19792 Search engine for FFF

For me this is a sign, that modders should use the mods.factorio.com instead. This is also the featured idea, that the devs push.

[Adil]

For me this is a sign, that modders should use the mods.factorio.com instead.

A quasi-forum with more basic features absent? Ugh, no. It seems to that here the search over the modding discussion/help threads is considered.
Does it have a search over discussions at all?

[ssilk]

Go into a discussion, use the search and you will find those posts with the keywords in.

[aubergine18]

It's good to know that mods.factorio.com discussions can be searched. However, that has nothing to do with searching forums.factorio.com for posts containing specific API terms.

[DaveMcW]

Have you tried "site:forums.factorio.com" in Google?

[aubergine18]

Yes, but most of the time it doesn't fare much better (particularly due to hyphenated prototype names common in Factorio). In particular, I don't know how to limit Google searches to a specific subset of the forums (eg. the 4 modding discussion/help forums). Also, it's somewhat inconvenient to jump out to google.