Search Box in Forums

A search feature isn't difficult? All right then. How would you implement it, exactly? Give me a specification. If you're a coder, you know how important a spec is, right?

Seeing that this was "built from the ground up" and not knowing what it is based off that is not possible. Not going to argue semantics. If you don't want to add a search feature, whatever. I just won't use the forums. I stopped coding because of no longer being able to use my hands. Same reason I refuse to use ctrl-F to search through a forum.

You don't need to know the intricacies of the system to spec a feature. But if you're going to be defeatist about it... We do not have the computing power to search effectively through the content that people generate. But even if we did, the number of people who title their threads incorrectly (or use "fancy symbols that look like letters" instead of actual letters) reduces the effectiveness. Furthermore, people mis-spell things a lot making a search less useful. On top of that, we did try out a search system before. It suffered from the major problem that you couldn't differentiate between a trade thread offering something, and someone else replying with an offer of that. Or people who had "Not looking for X" in their first post. The problem is, people are complicated. Computers cannot easily understand people, but other people generally can. This is why I'm favouring manual search over sinking development time into a system that can only barely work.

I use the search feature via Google, try your hand there it will give you an idea what kind of results you'll get if PFQ had a search feature on the forum. Also, it works quite well too at times, but not very effective for everytime use. You get many unwanted and useless results, even deleted threads. While searching on google, use 'site:https://pokefarm.com/forum "<keyword>"' Remove the single quotes while using the above search string and also put your desired keyword in double quotes, doesn't really matter. Obviously it will work better than Ctrl+F on every page on PFQ, but you'll also get ton of useless posts consisting of the Keyword that you entered,ain't that great! :D Hope this helps! Let Google do the hard work for you :3