I didn't see an announcement here like I was expecting. Lisa is typically on top of it They released their add-on today! =D Linky
Sorry LOL Been distracted by visitors at home today... but I know one of you lovely lot would field it for me
I am trying to resist playing with this shiny new toy. As enticing as it sounds I am not in the targeted demographics for needing it.
I'm toying with the idea of implementing it when we switch to XF. I'll let the early adopters play with it first and report back on whether it's resource hungry or not.
It costs money? Or am I confused? If so, I would think that would be a feature to add into the product :-\
It costs money because it's a separate add-on geared to a very specific group and needs server-level configuration to set up that isn't offered on shared or even VPS I think. It couldn't be added to the core, as a large majority would have no use for it to be of benefit, or could even run it.
It's actually not a bad deal if you ask me. The main problem with the methods of old were; 1. Too slow 2. Don't scale 3. Limited searching to words with at least 4 letters, which as you know isn't a great situation when you need to search for an uncommon 3-letter word. Your alternatives to this product are full-text tables (has problem 3, and some others like hyphens breaking search engine) or out sourcing your search engine to google (which isn't going to pick up much besides threads, and those take awhile to cycle into the results). Other than that, you could use the regular search functions and watch your sever explode when it tries to keep up. So $50 doesn't seem that bad if you have a forum in need of this feature. Most forums will never grow to this size, but if yours does $50 is not much of a turn off to you if you're looking to keep your search engine fully functional. Odds are you'd be paying way more than that in hosting fees, and this add-on might actually allow you to get more bang for the buck out of the server (because your search engine isn't constantly hogging so many resources). I'm interested in hearing from any big boards that are running this. There are a lot of forums I visit that could benefit from this add-on....if only they ran xenforo...
$50 was nothing and what makes it even nicer is the renewal fee is $10! I went to bed before my guys could get ElasticSearch fully config'd but I'm up earlier than the buttcrack of dawn so I can get it done now
Azzid, I'm not a member of your forum but I've used it in the past when I was looking to have a little fun with Borderlands on the Xbox with my buds after we had got bored of the game. We all sunk $60 in it when it came out expecting it to be the game to finally get us off our L4D kick. We were pretty much bored with it within a week, although we did all buy the DLC. >< Sunk a lot of money into that game and I hardly ever play it. So after that happened we got on a building guns and other items kick for awhile. We came up with some pretty rad stuff, nothing totally game breaking either. We were just making cool guns that you could almost mistake for begin legit. We all had a custom load out we put together, and we'd duel a lot with those modded guns. >) Nothing game breaking like those ass holes running around with guns that lag the game every time the pull the trigger. I also managed to get some custom maps for L4D1 running on the 360 after clearing my cache and getting rid of all the patches. We're actually planning a LAN party soon for my local team/buds. We're going to play 2v2s and with the help of a hacked save file we'll be able to beef up the versus mode and play some games under some insane rules. Like half the time until SIs respawn, tanks on every map, nerfed guns...the works. We're also going to be able to use the glitch we know about that so one person can switch teams and be survivors every round. Since that extra guy/bot gets killed at the safe room to make things fair (no survivor bots running around, remember its 2v2) the extra player that's constantly switching teams is the host. Since he's the host, he can play AI director throwing tanks/hordes/witches/whatever he wants at the survivors. He can also change aspects of the game via config commands on the fly. Should be a lot of fun and breed some life back into my favorite FPS game. Such a shame they released L4D2 so early and ruined the versus mode in the process. If you're interested, here is a video of our last 2v2 event, sadly played on dedicated servers on LIVE so no modded fun or rules. Every attack is a chance to kill the other team, super stressful and lots and lots of fun. Anyway just wanted to let you know that I'm a lurker over at your forum, not as much in the last few months though (taking a break from online gaming and console modification). Please let us know when you have it up and running, I'm interested in seeing how the server load is when this add-on is installed, and also, how the search results compare to a forum running the "stock" search engine.
That looks and sounds awesome! You planning on releasing all that with details on it? I've never gotten into L4D so I'm not even sure if something like that has been released yet. I've been working my way out of the gaming "scene". I love the site, the people, and running it...I just can't make the time to play it like I use to. The search is up and running right now. People love not having a character limit and the speed of the results. We didn't have the default search enabled because we knew this was coming out shortly so I can't really tell you the performance difference. I wanted the site to continue to run quickly so I didn't even try since we have over 4 million posts...I didn't want it bogging the server down causing people to leave due to lag. And didn't want our members to think our search was worthless like it was with IPB (default and sphinx were crap on IPB). Do you mind if I ask why you've remained a lurker and never registered? I've always wanted to ask guests why they have elected to remain guests and not get involved. I've stayed away from stupid tactics like forcing users to register, limit their viewing (blocking links from guests like many sites do), forcing registrations to download stuff, etc. I feel if they want to participate, they will register. My users just get upset because they think we get less people on the site because our "competitor" has more members on their site when they force you to be member to view links and to download programs. But back to my question, is it something with the site you think it doesn't entice people to register? Or just lack of wanting to participate or ask a question? Sorry for going off topic Lisa
I, too, would be interested to see what the overall resource usage is. Currently I use Sphinx and there's very little overhead on the server itself. To add Lucene, Elasticsearch AND java wrappers seems like my overhead would increase by quite a bit.
