As you may be aware, in the past couple of weeks we've been experiencing periodic and uncharacteristic amounts of slowdown. After discussion with Grahame and Philip, it's become apparent that at least some of this slowdown is due to the large amount of resources being dedicated to Elasticsearch, the background process that enables our handy on-site search function. Consequently, with an eye towards approving general board stability, we have disabled Elasticsearch, and are exploring alternative search methods that could be viable on the boards (E.g. integrated Google search, the default Xenforo search feature, etc.).

In practical terms for you, the users, you should expect search to not function properly while we consider alternatives, as Elasticsearch uses a dedicated index that posts made following the move have been sorted under. While we realize this isn't an ideal status quo, we're hoping that there's an improved main board usage experience as the tradeoff, and we hope you understand that this came down to a difficult calculus between having accessible boards and having a functioning search, and thus we chose the former.

While we're in this period of disabled Elasticsearch, please keep us abreast of errors that may be occurring as a result of that change in this thread. Also, our boards are fairly well-indexed by Google, so using their search engine combined with the tag "site:boards.theforce.net" should be a relatively useful substitute. For example, to search for uses of the phrase "Yarael Poof" on our boards, you can enter

Code:

Yarael Poof site:boards.theforce.net

into Google's search bar. We will also strive to keep you posted on updates as we become aware of them, but keep in mind that we're coordinating this alongside the expected hit from the release of The Force Awakens, so we're not necessarily going to see fast developments on this.

We apologize for the inconvenience this will obviously result in. If you have more questions, feel free to post them in this thread.

 

So this affects post history right? Because if I look at mine I see one post I made today but then the next one is from 2012.

 

I noticed the slow down the other day, I was really confused seeing as we were still 2 weeks out from Episode VII. Thanks for the update Ramza

 

Correct: your post history prior to the move was indexed during the move process, and thus still shows up as it's not part of Elasticsearch functionality, whereas posts made while Elasticsearch was enabled were indexed by Elasticsearch, and thus no longer show up. Getting those posts to show up in your history is something we're also investigating, but for now we're just looking to see if we get the stability improvements we want.

 

Not sure, but it'd be a nice plus. We do actually have a working theory now about the crashes that was born out of observations made following turning Elasticsearch off, so who knows?

 

Weird observation... mine still show up. In all tabs (postings, recent activity). Is that not supposed to happen? Do we have zombie elasticsearch? Or is it just something that *may* not work?

 

shhh don't tell 'em Volshe

 

No, your recent posts, like everyone's, are cut off at the time Elasticsearch was shut off. Only your posts back to around the wee hours of yesterday morning show up; those posts have been indexed by the regular XenForo functions. Everything between the move and early yesterday morning, though, was indexed by Elasticsearch and only Elasticsearch, so it is currently missing. For those of us who have been around since before the move, like me, our pre-move posts do also show up because they were indexed by XenForo during the move process presumably before Elasticsearch was set up.

 

This is a real bummer.

I know you guys are probably trying your best, but it feels like this board is leaking and gradually falling apart.

The truncated posts have never been fixed (it'll be four years next March).

And now, there's this.

Oh, well. Maybe just another bump in the road, on the way to something more special.

 

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

 

I didn't even know that we even had a functioning search! Doesn't seem that long since I was being told that Search wasn't working, so I had been using Google to look for old stuff on here.

 

That's what I was wondering - thanks. I didn't realise there was a separate index that the XenForo was capable of updating itself.

 

I notice that the number of online users is (currently, at least) back down to more normal levels similar to where it typically was prior to the TFA rush. If this persists, then with less load on the server, might it be possible to try turning Elasticsearch back on and see if the server can handle it now? Google is simply not an alternative for the types of searches I perform; I need, at the very least, the ability to filter by user, date, and/or thread and the ability to treat posts individually rather than just scanning the whole webpage, and I've been sorely missing these features.

 

Hello? Ramza? LAJ_FETT? Anyone?

 

OK, thanks. As long as I know I'm not being totally ignored.

 

Any updates on this?

 

just pointing out that with some form of function (even limited to the most popular boards), the quality of the discussions could be much better since we're currently just seeing the same things asked ad infinitum, in some cases and it is a major pain in the ass to go back through all the posts and find the ones manually, that have the answer..

 

any info on getting a new search engine or re-implementing the old one since traffic has gone down?

 

I asked the same question in the technical question thread and was told it won't be until a forum upgrade is done.

I don't know anything about the logistics/etc however I do see an awful lot of threads being deleted with the mods saying "Not appropriate a thread already exists"

As a new comer that is really hard to do without a search function.

 

yeah it worked ok but wreaked havoc with the site apparently.