Non-premium forum search..and whyFollow

Admins, i know you've seen this topic thousands of times, but i thought I might give my 2 cents on how it would help the site. Of course, only users that are logged in would be able to search, not just random visitors. I'm a fan of lists, so here it goes.

1) Letting non-pre's search would prevent multiple topics being created on the same subject. It would help to reduce 'topic spam', and would be less clutter for each forum, and less topics to possibly have to read/moderate.

2) It would take some weight off the karma system, and provide for a happier overall site experience. A lot of complaints from old/regular posters is that a topic has been gone over a hundred times. For instance, take a small read into the samurai forums, where several small concepts regarding the job are rehashed over and over again and thus make 'the helpers' more inclined to rate posters down. I think this is a very important consideration.

3) It would keep more traffic here, instead of people leaving to search other sites. This could possibly generate more ad revenue.

Implementation:

I don't know any specifics about bandwidth usage, or what is more profitable/better for zam as a whole, but heres my attempted insight into that region.

NOTE: Numbers 1 & 2 assume that multiple searches would be less bandwidth intensive than a singular, larger search. If this isnt the case, somewhat disregard these items.


1) Forum searching could be limited to singular sub forums (blue mage, ashura,etc) per query. Or possibly limited to top level forums such as all job forums or all server forums. This could possibly reduce server load.

2) A limit could be put on the amount of pages searched at a time, or on the date window of the searches made. A person searching would have to run a different search depending on the on how many pages or how far the results go back that they wish to view.

3) Additional ad space could be rendered below the the query boxes when performing a search, or below search results. See below ascii art :).

A. ---TOP AD BAR------
b. c.
| d.XXXXXXXXXXXXX |
| |
| e. NEW AD BAR |
| |


A. top ad bar
b. nav list
c. Side ad bar
d. Query boxes, or found content
e. additional ad bar

If searching for non-pre's is implemented, there would be the additional effect of lowering the number of topics made, thus there be being less to search, and less bandwidth required.

I hope this post is well-received, and thanks for your time.

Numbers 1 and 2 also assume that people aren't lazy. The information is already out there, if they wanted to search for it they already would have before making a topic.

That works yes, but is almost useless. Alla sadly doesn't put topic titles in the HTML title and so you have no idea what the topic is. That's just one of the problems.