Op 14-2-2023 om 15:38 schreef jr:
> hi,
> 
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>> ...
>> I just did a search for 'Kenneth' (by itself) and see that Google presents 10
>> pages of old entries MAXIMUM, with 10 hits per page. That's only 100 hits.
> 
> <tinfoil-hat>you're on the list of persons only allowed limited access to
> reality</tinfoil-hat>  :-)
> 
> I see more than 600, see attached.
> 

I got 670.

-- 
Thomas

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"jr" <cre### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> hi,
>
> "Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> > ...
> > I just did a search for 'Kenneth' (by itself) and see that Google presents 10
> > pages of old entries MAXIMUM, with 10 hits per page. That's only 100 hits.
>
> <tinfoil-hat>you're on the list of persons only allowed limited access to
> reality</tinfoil-hat>  :-)
>
> I see more than 600, see attached.
>

Ah, that's more like it! :-)

I see that my own search says "about 573 results". About?

But web portal/Google only presents 10 pages of the hits, sadly.

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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:

> Getting google to properly index the site is a constant battle. I have done all they
say I should do and set everythi
ng up using their webmaster tools. All I can do is wait and hope that they catch up.
It's difficult in that google may 
say one thing but do another; this is part of the never-ending battle between search
engines and those who would wish t
o influence the results/come out at the top for a query.


"According to a report from the Associated Press, Google is stepping up its so

by indoctrinating people to disbelieve what tech big wigs consider to be


Yet another reason to run, not walk away from something rife with corruption.

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Hi(gh)!

On 14.02.23 15:38, jr wrote:

> <tinfoil-hat>you're on the list of persons only allowed limited access to
> reality</tinfoil-hat>  :-)

There *is* no such thing as "reality" at all! You altogether are nothing 
but tiny little conscious-entity routines within the framework of 
KHYBERSPACE! Face it!

See you there!

Yadgar

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On 14/02/2023 23:45, William F Pokorny wrote:
> pokorny:tmp$ telnet news.povray.org 119
> Trying 203.29.75.35...
> Connected to news.povray.org.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> 200 news.povray.org DNEWS Version  5.7b1,, S0, posting OK
> article <5e9cce19@news.povray.org>
> ... I get what looks like some large mime dump that I suspect is
> due some attached images... Probably the header is there, but not sure how to see
the header in this case.

You can use 'head <5e9cce19@news.povray.org>' instead of 'article' in this case. And
to get just the body minus the headers you can use 'body'.

> What to make of this? Some of my stuff is on the server and other stuff is not?

I can't say for sure what's there and what's not. To be totally sure I'd need to write
some code to cross-reference posts that are in the database against those in the news
server. Generally speaking if an article is removed from the news server by some
automated process (expire or disk usage) they will remain in the DB. If they are
explicitly removed (by the user or an admin) then they will be gone from both.

At the moment there's no way to specifically search the web view's DB (or more
specifically, no way unless google gets their shit together).

That said, I have improved the search pages by switching to google's paid search
service. The results on the free tier which I was using were pretty terrible.

However that doesn't fix the issue of missing pages or improper dates etc which we've
seen.

I have made another attempt to get google to digest the site by providing them with a
sitemap (tried this in the past and it didn't help, but worth trying again).

If you were really keen to see if a particular message is in the web DB you can grab
the sitemap and download the files it refers to, then grep for the message ID. The
sitemap is currently at https://news.povray.org/gsitemap.xml. Note this is (currently)
static, generated as of a few hours ago. If it works then I'll set up a cronjob to
keep it updated.

In addition to the above I also retain log files containing all content posted to the
server since 2004 (at least in theory - the earliest is 2004 and latest is today, but
I have yet to check that they all line up wrt start/end so there's no missing dates).
But accessing those shouldn't be necessary provided the web DB has everything.

If after checking the above-mentioned resources doesn't find a message you think is
missing it probably wouldn't be too difficult to throw together a simple perl script
to pull every post you made from the log files.

-- Chris

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On 19/02/2023 23:36, Chris Cason wrote:
> If you were really keen to see if a particular message is in the web DB you can grab
the sitemap and download the files it refers to, then grep for the message ID. The
sitemap is currently at https://news.povray.org/gsitemap.xml. Note this is (currently)
static, generated as of a few hours ago. If it works then I'll set up a cronjob to
keep it updated.

Forgot to mention there's another way if you know the message ID: just tack it onto
the end of the URL. For example <5e9cce19@news.povray.org> can be found via
https://news.povray.org/5e9cce19@news.povray.org (you can include the '<' and '>' if
you want, but it's not required).

-- Chris

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On 15/02/2023 03:12, Kenneth wrote:
\> Ah, that's more like it! :-)
> 
> I see that my own search says "about 573 results". About?
> 
> But web portal/Google only presents 10 pages of the hits, sadly.

I've updated the site search to use google's paid service, so it shouldn't show any
ads now and hopefully does return more useful results.

Sorting by date is useless, though. Google doesn't seem to pay attention to the
structured data containing the post dates.

It would be interesting to see if other search engines return more posts, specifically
if they return ones that google seems to not want to index.

-- Chris

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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:

> I've updated the site search to use google's paid service,

Again, thank you.  While I don't "know" from experience what it's like, I can
extrapolate based on managing large-ish projects and knowing many people who
have managed long-term projects.   But nothing as long-term as THIS!

You should have a donation page AND a shrine.


> Sorting by date is useless, though. Google doesn't seem to pay attention to the
structured data containing the post d
ates.
>
> It would be interesting to see if other search engines return more posts,
specifically if they return ones that googl
e seems to not want to index.

{sigh}
I hope that this new money and effort isn't wasted - I was just trying again
last night to reference some very recent posts of my own, and I didn't find what
I was looking for.

I often try to use the "site:news.povray.org search-terms" format to focus on
what I want to find, but I inevitably get a lot of results that unsurprisingly
have to do with bald eagle news stories and whatnot.

If there are any tricks (keywords added to posts, special characters, etc) that
would help find things that would be good to know.  At least I could start
writing better posts that would help me find them in the future.

Is there any extant special kung-fu that allows looking for posts only BY a
specific user, or that only have attachments?  If there's an upper limit on the
number of results, that might help keep the desired posts from falling off that
far edge.

I'm also wondering if Thunderbird users have the ability to search their
downloaded messages more efficiently than G**gle, since I'm imagining that it
would be much like searching my email or using grep on local files.

- BW

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:

>
> You should have a donation page AND a shrine.

I second that!

>
> If there are any tricks (keywords added to posts, special characters, etc) that
> would help find things that would be good to know.  At least I could start
> writing better posts that would help me find them in the future.
>

Well, in the web portal/Google, I do searches like...
   kenneth isosurface color_map bald eagle

and it returns hits that have ALL (or any?) of the relevant terms. But I guess
you already know that.

I have also naively tried 'boolean search' (?), although I don't know much about
how this is syntactically structured, or if I even know what I'm doing:

   kenneth + isosurface - color_map - bald eagle

... but that returns the same hits as previously.

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On 20/02/2023 00:50, Bald Eagle wrote:
> Is there any extant special kung-fu that allows looking for posts only BY a
> specific user, or that only have attachments?  If there's an upper limit on the
> number of results, that might help keep the desired posts from falling off that
> far edge.

This is possible in theory. I do include author info in the structured data. If I
switch to their JSON API it is possible to apply refinements like searching by author.

I could also set this up directly from the web interface (basically another set of
pages, one for each author), but if I did this at all I'd only apply it to ones who
had more than a (yet-to-be-decided) minimum number of posts.

(Come to think of it, that would be pretty handy. Hmmmm ...)

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