As far as user friendliness goes, I've found the wikia search engine and interface to be a bit lacking. Coming from a relatively new user who has been doing lots of research and testing while starting up the UC Berkeley Wiki, there is nothing more frustrating than searching for something you know is there only to have no results come back.

First of all, having categories like Help and Advice and even categories themselves not come up by default is silly. Yes, you can have some of these boxes checked by default in your preferences, but that's a lot to expect from new users. If there is a way to specify by default, please let me know.

Also, 3 letter words and plurals could definitely be handled better. I suppose these could be handled with redirects, but that's a pretty big hassle.

I just noticed that WowWiki has a new and improved search engine that addresses some of my concerns, any plans to implement it for other wikia?

-Matthew 01:00, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Thoughts on Searching

Just to make sure that I know what you're talking about - you're talking about pages, categories, and whatnots not showing up when you do a Search for them even though you know they're there, right?

I know that other people have expressed similar frustrations and some of these people have dealt with the problem in a myriad of ways from adding hard links to the 'Help' and 'Advice' categories to their sidebar menu or some other menu to adding 'Search' and 'Advice' pages that link to the appropriate categories and pages.

I know it's a frustrating workaround, but they ARE ways to work around the issue?

I agree that this problem needs to be addressed and fixed.

I wonder if perhaps this issue partially stems from the fact that in all other communities and websites, 'Help' information is almost always presented separately from the actual site content. To have the 'Help' information located within the 'meat' of the site/forum/community/whathaveyou is actually a bit of an oddity.

I'm not sure how much sense that made, but you search through a Wikia for information related to the subject matter the Wikia is hosting, right?

To search in the search box for 'Help' in editing the Wikia IS a logical thing given the nature and concept of the wiki system, but generally speaking, a person searches a wiki for its contents, not for 'how to do XYZ' TO the wiki itself.

In all honesty, where this issue with searching and not finding bugs me, I've also gotten into the habit of simply hard linking the 'Help' and 'Advice' categories if only because I am so used to having my 'Help' permanently linked somewhere for easy access on other websites and communities.

Notherland 08:00, 20 August 2008 (UTC)