Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

Issue

Cannot find thread titles using the flow search.

Background

As noted in the subject page, the built in search engine can find all flow "boards" (Flow#Is there a way to all find pages that use Flow .3F), but it can't find any threads / topics names within them, nor is it possible to search the board description, or flow summaries. Full flow search may take a while (or never happen) but making it possible to search for topic titles would be a minor (and hopefully easy) short term improvement.

Proposed solution

Separate the different parts of flow into separate content:

1. flow-board - The main discussion page consisting of flow topics
2. flow-topic / flow-thread - The specific discussion within a board, storing just the titles for now

The ones suggested for now, would be 1 (which already exists), and 2 which would make it possible to see all discussions titles, without fully obtaining all the text within it. Number 3 (and the rest) are probably best left for a future date as they are probably more complicated.

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Long term (as in not part of the immediate suggestion)

• flow-post - The individual posts within each thread, possibly for a future date. Since flow may either internally store them as wikitext or html.

• Might be indexed as part of the wikitext content model:
  • Summary - summary of each board (if it exists)
  • Description - description of each board

Thank you for you message! We are discussing about implementing search, both on a board or a whole set of topics. The ideas you have are options we are discussing about.

Hopefully it is simpler than attempting to get the whole flow search to work, as far as I understand it. The fact that it finds flow-board at all, was actually an "accident" or side-effect of new functionality in the search engine rather than any changes to flow itself.

Anyway, this task seems related: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73196.