Hi Becky is there any chance of a search engine for members to find other members in there area. It could be split by counties and countrys.

Hey Babe,

Great idea and... yes and yes - been meaning to do it for a while, The information is stored just need to get my head around it - soon I promise



x Becca

Hi Becky, another search function could be the date of joining this site.

I have been trying to use - https://www.transtastic.com/se4/members
But no matter what I put in, I either get 6631 profiles (all of the UK?) or none...
I think the "Country" is "GB" or "United Kingdom"?, and when I put my town in, it does complete that to show "Warwick, United Kingdom", but I can not figure how to get a smaller set of results... Any hints & Tips would be appreciated. Cheers, Caitlin

One problem with our search facility is that for years members have been able to put their locations in their profiles by just typing them in. So, some might type Warwickshire in full while others might type Warks. Many, many places have a number of different names which makes things a bit difficult when we want to search on location.

We are looking at ways we can fix this however. So for now you'll just have to try searching for each possibility but soon we hope you won't have to when we standardise the way locations are stored.

It all costs money though so the main obstacle to getting this done is simply funding. If more people donated to the site more regularly, we could get improvements like this added sooner.

So please let me remind everyone about our Transtastic Donation page at:

https://www.transtastic.com/se4/pages/donation

Thanks,

Katie.

Hi Katie, I wish it was that easy. It would be handy to know what you put in ALL the fields (or can leave blank) to get any search to work. I have tried all sort of combinations ("Cov","Coventry", and even let it fill in "Coventry, United Kingdom"), all to no avail...
Can you tell me some combination that you use to get less than 6000 results?
I am sure all this messing around is consuming server resource, so making this easier should help the whole site.
Thank you for the contribution page link - I am thinking on that, but would like to see that this site is usable before I do. I do contribute to other sites, and I think I will here, but there are a few niggles that are stopping me - searching is one - I am sure others manage to, but it has flawed me so far.
Many thanks, Caitlin

I have simplified the search criteria a bit so it should be easier to use now. However, I have discovered that the 'Where' field is not working and returns no results. I will ask the developers to look at that.

I tried entering various town and city names into the Town/City field and it worked fine. Instead of 6000+ results I received only the members who actually live in those places, which is what we want.

And thanks for thinking about making a contribution. Unfortunately it's always a bit of a chicken and egg thing because some people say they won't contribute until everything is perfect but it never will be because we cannot afford to pay for the work involved until people step up and donate something towards the work that needs to be carried out.

And remember too, that search is just one part of this enormous site. Over the last year we have spent a large amount on improving the Photo Galleries, Forums, Blogs, Events area and the Profiles page and we've added many new features like Dating tools and Personal Ads, plus we've improved the site speed and made numerous improvements under the bonnet which you may never see. Most of the cost has come out of my own pocket but I cannot afford to subsidise this free site for much longer. We really need members to start helping out or we may lose everything.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any more search problems and I'll add them to the list of things that need fixing.

Thanks,

Katie

Sorry Katie, still no joy - I uploaded a screen shot to one of my albums to show what I entered. Just London, then click search. I must be doing something wrong. I get the little spinny thing for a bit, then no results...
Caitlin

Doh - used "Coventry" in the "Town/City" field and got 21 hits.
Weird, I dont now see "City" next to Browse by?
Caitlin
x

That's because we have always used the Town/City field, which works fine. A new 'City' field was introduced when we recently upgraded the Profile Search page. As it has not been used in the past, it will return no results and as it confuses the issue to have two City Fields, I have now removed that one permanently.

And remember that this search form is used for searching member's profiles and that's why it does not return results for albums or photos.

You can search for albums by location by using the Albums Search form on the main albums page or to search for everything by location, just use the search box in the header of every page.

We are intending to massively improve the main search tool but as usual, we can't quite afford to right now. It's coming soon though.