New Panther Chameleon forum

Can you guys make it easier to find other Chameleons without scrolling through 100s of Panther Chameleons?

What would you suggest? A separate classifieds section for every species of chameleon? Do you think the number of such classified ads would justify such a change?

Would it be possible to add search option to omit results with certain words or phrases?

Possibly. I'll run it by my programmer and see what he says. Not everything is as simple as you would hope nor expect.

Amen to that

Originally Posted by WebSlave

...separate classifieds section for every species of chameleon? Do you think the number of such classified ads would justify such a change?

Not common in searches, but a blacklist might make sense even for other sections. Second option is just a Panther or Designer Chameleons? Either way it is tedious seaching past all the Panthers.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

Possibly. I'll run it by my programmer and see what he says. Not everything is as simple as you would hope nor expect.

Sorry about the delay coming back to this. Had other irons in the fire that needed to be addressed. Anyway, here is the response I got back from my programmer about the suggestion to provide an exclusion option on the search function:

Hi Rich,

Its possible to add a "exclude term" section in advanced search page. But vb's search algorithm is the most complicated section of the code and IMHO, it does not worth efforts to hack this section just to meet this request.

Best,
Sinan

Based on the relative lack of traffic in the chameleons classifieds forum, I would have to agree that if this would be a complex hack (meaning expensive for time and effort involved) then I can't see that it would be justified for the expense that would be incurred.

Originally Posted by spinytail

Not common in searches, but a blacklist might make sense even for other sections. Second option is just a Panther or Designer Chameleons? Either way it is tedious seaching past all the Panthers.

I again reviewed the chameleons classifieds forum, and quite frankly, I just do not see the traffic and number of new ads there that makes it seem like an undue burden just to look through the ads for what you are looking for. If it were a fact that the forum was filled with over flowing new ads every day, and we were talking about 50 or more unique new ads every day, then yes, perhaps a change would be in order. But from what I am seeing, there are ads on the first page even dating back to 12-21-2017, and the simple fact is that many of the ads appearing to be newer than those older ones are actually just ads that have had replies that bumped them on to the first page more recently.

Sorry, but I just do not see the amount of traffic there that would warrant dividing the chameleon classifieds into two or more sections, which would then likely cause all of them to suffer from even more dismal results concerning participation and new ads PER FORUM. This, quite frankly, would just be a waste of time, effort, and resources, and likely prove to be destructive in general to the site, in my opinion.

I am sorry, but I have to be realistic about how I allocate funds for this site and entertain such suggested modifications based on what seems most prudent and cost effective to implement.

I guess I need to remind people that using the classifieds sections here is FREE for all registered members. Perhaps if paid memberships, and traffic in general, were increasing rather than diminishing, suggestions such as this could be looked at in a different light. But as always, it is what it is.

Thanks for at least considering Rich. It has been a while since I did some PHP but I can see that area being very complex, archaic and high risk for a developer. Well it was worth a shot.

With that said, I can still foresee this feature (on all forums as you would code once) improving activity and in turn sellers increasing activity, but it is just a hunch and I would not be the one out-of-pocket testing that hunch.

Anyways, thanks again for looking into it at least.

Just out of curiosity, but does FaceBook, or even Google, have such an exclusion capability in searches? Heck, do any sites you frequent have this capability?

Originally Posted by WebSlave

Just out of curiosity, but does FaceBook, or even Google, have such an exclusion capability in searches? Heck, do any sites you frequent have this capability?

Yeah, you can exclude from search using the minus sign delimiter (-). This can be tie into other delimiters as well.

A search of "chameleon -panther" would return only results containing chameleon, but exclude those results containing panther as well as the search term chameleon.