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weechat / weechat.org

Source code of weechat.org.
https://weechat.org/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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no search feature for website #46

Open highflyer77 opened 8 years ago

highflyer77 commented 8 years ago

Most nice websites that contain extensive information have their own means to search the site. Lots of drop in solutions exist:

flashcode commented 8 years ago

What do you need to search on the website? I think most info you need are in the docs, and you can easily search in them, as they are in HTML format on the site. In my opinion, it's better to go on the docs page, select the appropriate doc (for example API if you're writing a plugin/script), and click on it, rather than using a search box that would give many results and would be hard to find what you're looking for. If you need to search on the whole site, you can still do it with google or other search engines with: "site:weechat.org something".

highflyer77 commented 8 years ago

Sorry I didn't answer your question sooner.

Not for me, but, I can't tell you how many times I've seen new users ask for help on #weechat and thought they have looked in the docs for something but didn't find it. That's why I'd like to see a search on the website.

I guess you are right I could traverse each of the 8 documents listed on the Documents page. Maybe also look in the release notes or changelog to see if the issue could be found there, then maybe check the roadmap to see if issue is planned. Also, I might want to check the dev blogs, but wait, those do have a search feature. Or maybe I want to search an issue but didn't know that it could be found out with script that I didn't know about with some feature. Or, maybe it would be in a new script that hasn't implimented yet. Then I could search un-official scripts, maybe what I'm looking for could be there. Wow, now I'm getting really tired, and decide to call it a day, maybe I'll try tomorrow.

Also, I thought it would be nice if search could get cross-site search results like: weechat.org, github, savana, flashtux.org.

But you ask, why should any website have a search feature, when everyone can just use google? Maybe I'll just go to google and find unrelated things like "wechat".

But it's apparent you think this is a bad idea, because you probably would have done it by now. So should I close this issue down?

flashcode commented 8 years ago

I didn't say it's a bad idea, just wanted to know in which cases that could be useful. Doing a cross site search feature (weechat.org, github, savannah, ...) is even harder, I have no idea how to do that: how to index data that you don't own, except by crawling these sites? If some things are hard to find in docs, or are missing, they should be reported and I'll improve/fix docs. I agree some users may have looked in ALL docs and didn't find the answer in docs, in which case the docs have to be improved. But most users ask in #weechat without reading docs at all :-P