Ed,

Just noticed that Rick Cowles has a Full Text Search capability on his Greenspun Electric Utilities and Y2K Forum. Go to:

http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=Electric%20Utilities%20and%20Y2K

Look down near the bottom of the thread catagories (also mentioned up at the top level too). Tested it. It works.

Why cant the same thing be applied to this forum? Is that something you can arrange with Philip Greenspun?

Thanks,

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), April 05, 1999

Answers

Folks,

I sent an email message to Rick Cowles the other day, asking him how he had managed to arrange the search engine on his forum. Here is his reply:

"Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com) made the arrangements with Philip - I'm not sure of the total cost. Philip asked that we (the euy2k.com forum participants) contribute to his favorite charity; Critt collected the contributions then forwarded to Philip.

"I don't know if the degree of difficulty is different in creating the search capabilities, depending on database size and relative traffic. Timebomb 2000 forum has 70,000 messages and quite a few new postings every day; euy2k.com forum has around 3,500 with 10 or 15 total postings on a heavy day. 5 to 10 grand seems a bit steep, though." --------

I believe it was Critt who attempted to organize a series of contributions from participants on this forum, and found that while everyone was interested in the concept, only a handful were actually willing to cough up the money. I'm willing to kick in $100, but I can understand that a lot of people might not be willing to contribute more than five or ten dollars. If indeed the cost of developing a search engine tailored to this site is approx $5-10K, then we would need a reasonable number of contributors.

Perhaps we could get an idea of the level of interest by having people post a message on this thread to indicate roughly how much you'd be willing to contribute. This doesn't constitute a formal obligation, but it would help us all see whether there's enough interest to pursue it further.

I'll send another message to Philip Greenspun (our ubermeister webmaster) to see if the estimated cost has gone up or down. I suspect that the volume and bandwidth of this forum would make the issue somewhat more expensive or complicated, but that's only a guess.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), April 05, 1999.

Amen.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), April 05, 1999.

Can't see why it wouldn't work, but might there be bandwidth problems? Now that this forum has gotten so huge, would multiple people using the search engine make the forum like being stuck in glue? Hoping for an official answer.

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), April 05, 1999.

Ed, since euy2k does have a working search, maybe we can make a deal with Rick, Philip and Critt to "borrow" it. It may need some tuning for this site, but the majority of the work seems to be already done. Just my $.02 <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), April 05, 1999.

Sys -

My sense is that a search engine is likely to create some serious performance issues on this already overburdened (and completely free!) site, thus creating a need for further investment in the host system by Philip Greenspun. Look at the difference in scale between EUY2K and "Timebomb 2000". Don't know about you, but I already get timeouts just trying to access this forum. Based on current behavior, we'd almost be certainly making a major trade in accessibility and response time for the desired ability to search.

I see this engine as a "nice-to-have", but not a vital need, and especially not if it takes time and resources (i.e., $$$) away from someone's preps. YMMV.

Just being "Stick-in-the-Mud" Mac

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.com), April 05, 1999.

This is a very special place, inhabited by very special people (& other assorted mammals;-). Thank you!

It is getting somewhat late in my Y2K journey for a search engine to be of much use. However, I've certainly received my money's worth to this point! Based upon the value this forum has provided me in the past, I would not be justified in avoiding dropping a fin or two into the kitty.

Count me in.

-- Bingo1 (howe9@pop.shentel.net), April 05, 1999.

As stated above, it is geting late in the game. Ten G's is alot to spend now. IMHO, we need all the cash we can get for prep.

-- SCOTTY (BLehman202@aol.com), April 05, 1999.