Why do we need to wait 90 seconds between searches...
 

If No results have been returned?

I can understand it if you are trying to search over and over, but if you get zero results, why the delay?

BTW, I'm not really complaining by writing this post - Just killing 90 seconds lol

I would imagine the search is just as taxing on the server regardless of whether it returned any results. Back when this site was hopping I remember them implementing it to help ease the load on the server.

Possibly, and I'm in no way a server expert, but I'd assume that a successful search that returns say 70 plus results across all sub forums and takes a good few seconds to appear on screen, would be more taxing on the server than a search that just comes back with an instantaneous 'No Results'

But I dunno - It just annoyed me :)

If you spend three minutes looking for your car keys, it doesn't matter if you found them or not, you've still spent three minutes searching.

It's not much different with a server. You tell the server to do the search, and it puts a load on the server - no matter if it finds results or not.

cheap ass website worrying about 10's of people running searches a day.

Not fair. Try paying for the hosting required to provide this forum.

It's usually not about how many people do searches each day. It's how many people do searches at the same time.

-Dino

There are roughly 1.1 million threads posted here and somewhere around 19.5-20.0 million posts in those threads. It will take some time to search through all that and no matter how good your anti-bot system ever gets, a hard time limit will make even a bot or scraper wait.

90 second wait time makes this completely useless... you search for something, don't quite find what you were looking for, and so have to wait 90 seconds to try again? pretty damn ridiculous...

Due to the software structure that forums like this use, searches are the most database intensive tasks. Without a delay, bots or people running malicious code could hammer the forum with thousands of requests a second and bring the database to a crawl. That could (in theory) make the forum unstable or unusable for the average member.

That being said, a 20 second delay may provide the same function as a deterrent from abusive search hits and be more palatable to your average member who is just looking for useful information here.

Because there used to be lots of people posting here ... and the bots.

Good answer:thumbsup...

My guess is that the 90 second delay was necessary when this site was really hoppin' back in 2007 or so. I'd be very surprised if the goal of the delay could not be met with a shorter delay today.

If you learn how to use google, you can search the site without any delays.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site...tly+sober+shit

I tell you a secret. This works much better than the board search button:

google.com/search?q=site:gfy.com+keyword

and you don't have to wait ;)

Fulltext search on a db with 30 million posts will take a long time, even with zero results... Without the throttle (or some kinda captcha between searches) someone could kill the site by searching with a bot.

Well wouldn't it make more sense for GFY to actually use google for its search then? Actually make the search function use google for its results and thus make the site site cheaper and faster to run by eliminating the 'on site' search all together?

No because google won't let you search by user, with a date range, etc.

To reduce CPU usage...

fucking seriously?

<== FUCKING NAME DROPPER!!!

(We'll get to more about that later in the post)

Because of the bots we all used to use back in the day.

You see, I might have had a bot (HYPOTHETICALLY!!!) and said bot might have searched for posts and then posted something about said post.

For instance. My bot (HYPOTHETICALLY!!!) would have searched the forum for every time somebody created a thread with:
spam + host
best + host
good + host
anybody + host

It would have searched the forums every 5 minutes and when it found somebody asking about hosting it would have (HYPOTHETICALLY!!!) replied with why I think Cyberwurx is a great hosting company.

My other bots were (HYPOTHETICALLY!!!) searching for similar threads about dating, webcams and MILF sponsors, among others, and then replying about why my sponsor choice was the best with an affiliate link.

Now multiply this by my (HYPOTHETICALLY!!!) other 25 accounts and then multiply that by 100 other GFY'ers allegedly... allegedly doing this with their 25 accounts (ahem Juicy...) not naming names here!!! Ooops!

Now you have the most taxing thing happening 100 times per minute and it killed the server.

Hope that clears it up for you.

:2 cents::thumbsup

If you've ever had a bot attack one of your search scripts you'd see how fast it brings a server to a crawl.

so just need to add captcha after X searches per day per user/ip? Entering captcha is 100x easier than waiting 90 seconds to try again...

You knowv This aint goigle

You could use IE with username XXXXXXX and use firefox with YYYYYY and chrome with ZZZZZ then you can search 3 times as fast.

Bogs the mysql server I guess.