Search Metafiler bug

January 30, 2005 2:56 PM

Found a bug in Search Metafilter that could be rather painful for both the server and the client. [mi]
posted by furtive to Bugs at 2:56 PM (8 comments total)

If you do a search with [] in it (e.g. "[foo]" ) you will get about 35883 results
returned and it will try to render them all, assuming you search from day one.

If you do it in users (e.g. "[furtive]") you'll get a result for each one.

My good friend CyTrO (who usually wraps his name in square braces) is the one who noticed this when he checked to see if
he still had an account here or if it was purged. Maybe you guys could spare
him the $5 and give him a new account in exchange for this handy bit of testing ;-)

Cheers.

P.S. Why isn't "metafilter" in the dictionary?
posted by furtive at 2:57 PM on January 30, 2005

It is.
posted by banished at 4:10 PM on January 30, 2005

That's not a dictionary, that internet wiki crap.
posted by Captaintripps at 4:14 PM on January 30, 2005

I think furtive means MeFi's spell checker dictionary.
posted by sciurus at 4:26 PM on January 30, 2005

sciurus is correct. I should have qualified my statement.
posted by furtive at 5:41 PM on January 30, 2005

i guess the search is using regexp syntax, so [abc] means match any of a, b or c?
posted by andrew cooke at 4:26 AM on January 31, 2005

Yeah, I thought the same. I'd say one of three things should be done:

1. Filter the [] characters, and possibly other regexp related characters.

2. Start paging results, 10 to 50 a page is more than enough.

3. Cap results returned at 100 or so.
posted by furtive at 5:56 AM on January 31, 2005

paging results would also be a great way to make the "All Ask MeFi/AskMe/MeTa posts by username" pages more useful. If you want to look up a recent comment by a prolific user in this way it can be really time-consuming just to load the page.
posted by jessamyn at 8:26 AM on January 31, 2005