Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Postings indexed

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Postings indexed

Why are some postings indexed right away and others never get indexed or get indexed randomly????

It's a dang mystery. Best wishes, Rex

Will someone from fodors post here and tel us why please.

Only hope of getting an answer to this question is to write a thoughtful letter to [email protected] or [email protected] and even then, I would estimate the probability of a response to be very low.

I got a polite, brief reply from someone at [email protected] saying that a request to look into indexing problems has been forwarded directly from Mr. Mangin to the "producers of the database".

I am hoping that this scheduled service outage this Saturday relates to this response from Mr. Mangin's office.

No, the Saturday shutdown has nothing at all to do with Fodors in particular, it's a scheduled maintenance for their host, which is their publisher, Random House.

But saying that the problem(s) would be referred to the "producers of the database" might well mean technical staff at RandomHouse. And while they are performing other "maintenance", they might look into why the indexing holes plague this database.

Nothing fixed with the indexing, as far as I can tell, during the service outage, which sure didn't seem to last long.

There is now about a four day lag in the indexing.

It is more like a forty day lag in indexing. What has been indexed lately? Removal, yes; Indexing, no.

Please explain what "indexing" is. Thanks.

Indexing is a necessary step to be able to retrieve any particular post with the search engine here. It is just like indexing a book to the the back of the book index. This particular thread, for example has a unique identifier - - as does every thread - - and there is a giant "indexing" file which is like a dictionary or alphabetic list of all the words used on all the posts on this forum. And when this thread gets "indexed", it will get indexed into the "index file" with information filed under the words "postings" and "indexed" and "zash" and so forth. The indexing was last done on November 11. You can tell this with a post like "May weather in Norway/Sweden" which got one post from Bjorn on November 11. And you can find that post right now by searching "Bjorn". As new posts get added, they too have to be indexed. So you can find THIS thread under "indexed" - - but not under "forty" - - not until the database is newly indexed. These are trivial examples, but they illustrate the point. More relevant examples are for names of places. For example, there is a post about the town Corleone started about 24 hours ago. It has received seven replies, and it has currently fallen to the second page. You cannot (currently) retrieve it with the search engine - - until the indexing gets updated. So people sometimes think that their posts have disappeared. It is one of the weakest aspects (technical performance) of this forum.

Still no indexing since Nov 11

Now, a week behind.

Now ten days behind. Over a thousand posts not retrievable with the search function here. The most recent thousand. Please write to [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected]