The IF Answers Q&A site

It’s quite hard to search these forums to find if your question has been asked before. So we’ve set up a Q&A website: IF Answers

You will always still be able to ask questions here, but we hope that this new site will make it easier to get answers quickly.

Cool!

It really isn’t. Just go to Google. Type in your search text (and be sure to put quotes around any phrase that needs to have an exact match). The trick is, afterwards, add the specifier ‘site:intfiction.org’.

For example…

"custom library messages" plurals site:intfiction.org

This is also how I search site:inform7.com if I need to. If I want to search just the manuals, I use site:inform7.com/learn … and if/when I end up consulting the ‘IF Answers’ site, I’ll just go directly to Google and type site:ifanswers.com - I won’t even TRY a site’s built-in search anymore, because I have yet to encounter an instance where any site’s local search system has surpassed the amount of useful info about that site I can encounter by selectively ransacking a global search index. (The only exception to this being, sites that intentionally hide their pages from Google, which is so rare an occurrence, I can’t think of any examples right now.)

The difficulty is the flood of results for a common query with Google. I feel certain I saw a post just a couple days ago about a “[any known thing]” Understand line causing the error for an incorrect verb to become “you can’t see any such thing”, and how to fix that. But since “you can’t see any such thing error unknown verb” consists entirely of ‘common’ words the search on this site is useless, and since Google doesn’t let me limit by posting date I mostly get posts with transcripts showing other bugs.

I see your point, but Google actually does let you restrict the date post-search using the ‘Search Tools’ button (although the process is sometimes a bit buggy). More importantly, by judicious use of quotation marks to force exact matches, the number of results can be reduced to a manageable size. To use your example…

Google search for “any known thing” “you can’t see any such thing” site:intfiction.org

Are you by any chance looking for this thread, Draconis?

That might be the one. Thanks!

Seeing as “any known thing” and “you can’t see any such thing” are not actually in that thread, no amount of search-fu would have helped. Which is where the human factor comes in, and is to my mind always superior, even if imperfect compared to the machine. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I never had any difficulty using this forum’s SEARCH option, but it’s always good to have alternatives.

Ifanswers is right now giving the following message: “Could not establish database connection. Please check the username, password and hostname in the config file, and if necessary set up the appropriate MySQL user and privileges.”

It is back up now after I rebooted it.

If it happens again please email me at alex@textadventures.co.uk and I’ll get on the case.

Oh, this is actually dead. I guess this thread no longer needs pinning?

It’s linked from the subforum description as well.

Fixed.