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Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
https://alaveteli.org
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Make help pages searchable #233

Open sebbacon opened 13 years ago

TomSteinberg commented 10 years ago

@garethrees @hsenag Have you seen any sign of demand for this? If so please re-open

hsenag commented 10 years ago

I've never heard of demand for it.

garethrees commented 10 years ago

Ditto

garethrees commented 3 years ago

As our help pages have grown it's become increasingly difficult to find information on them. @sallytay has noticed this as a newcomer to the service, and I'm inclined to agree – I'm always opening several help pages and using the browser's "find" function to try to locate the specific section I'm interested in.

It also makes the site more self-service. For example, if a user was trying to contact the ICO, a search on an Alaveteli for "How do I contact the ICO?" wouldn't result in the information so they'd end up contacting us.

mdeuk commented 3 years ago

As our help pages have grown it's become increasingly difficult to find information on them. @sallytay has noticed this as a newcomer to the service, and I'm inclined to agree – I'm always opening several help pages and using the browser's "find" function to try to locate the specific section I'm interested in.

+1 - I'm constantly doing this, even if it's just to check on something.

It also makes the site more self-service. For example, if a user was trying to contact the ICO, a search on an Alaveteli for "How do I contact the ICO?" wouldn't result in the information so they'd end up contacting us.

+1 as well - this brings us closer to emulating an experience many people will already be familiar with, the knowledge base type offering which nearly every retailer or service provider pushes on their website.

It'd also allow us to look at reducing correspondence by making the contact option slightly less obvious if we were so inclined - e.g. an option could be to add a "did this answer your query?" query on the help page, which if "no" was selected could then lead to a decision tree and would allow for a structured email to be generated if necessary.

garethrees commented 3 years ago

Since the help pages are actually written in the theme and custom to each site, I'm wondering whether we can add a rake task that runs on deployment that renders out the content of each help page and adds them to the Xapian index.

gbp commented 2 years ago

I highly doubt we would be able to combine with the main search site form. So we would have to have a search form under /help located in the sidebar between TOC and the contact us sections might work.

In order to use a Xapian index, with our current implementation of ActsAsXapian we would require moving the help pages into the database and to create models for them. Making for a much bigger job.

So assuming we don't want to do that I think we would need to use fuzzy matching for search terms. When searching, we would load the views one-by-one in memory and match. I think some sort of rake task to run at deployment would help by rendering any ERB content, removing the top and tail from the outputted HTML so we're left with to main content to match against.

Would be nice if we could link to the exact reference of the search term on the help page as these pages are quite long. Not sure how we would do this short of moving the help pages into the database.