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Forum search issue with 5.2.6 AND 5.3.1

Forum search issue with 5.2.6 AND 5.3.1

Dave Rodenbaugh

Member

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Sep 13, 2013 - 11:29 am

So, I'm noticing the pagination links aren't working most of the time for searches in my forums (for 5.2.6 and 5.3.1). The page links don't seem to work properly.

Forum link to try this: http://awpcp.com/forum/?search.....;include=1

(that's the 5.3.1 link)

Example:

For instance, I do a basic search with text "plugin" and it shows 1890 results. Then if I select page 2 or 3 (or whatever) to see more results, it simply goes to a page saying "There were no topics found". This does NOT happen all the time, but close to 95% of the time.

My users are complaining they can't find anything in the forums because of this...Ideas?

Yellow Swordfish

Glinton, England

SP Master

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Sep 13, 2013 - 12:03 pm

Do you have either (a) something installed that may be blocking or removing WordPress transient records? Or (b) something installed that might inhibit the discovery of a users IP address?

YELLOW

SWORDFISH

Dave Rodenbaugh

Member

Offline

Sep 13, 2013 - 1:56 pm

Not that I'm aware of. Here's a list of plugins I have installed on both sites that are the same (since that would be the only common element between them):

Akismet
All in One SEO
Change WP Mail From details
Page Links To
SEO Keyword Suggestions by HitTail
Simple Press
Tim Thumb Scanner
Visual Website Optimizer
WordPress.com Stats/Helper
Wordfence Security
WP Affiliate
WP eStore

None of those would inhibit things that I'm aware of. Do you see any incompatibilities?

Yellow Swordfish

Glinton, England

SP Master

Offline

Sep 13, 2013 - 2:20 pm

I am not familiar with it but the security one might have something to do with it perhaps? Let me explain...

A search is extremely database intensive and 'expensive'. It can also take a while to get the necessary data. So with SP we only run a search query once which is the initial run. We then save off all of the forum/topic keys to a WordPress transient record. When page 2 - or any other page is requested - we simply get the list of keys from that record and then just load the necessary topic data. So basically we cache the results to save running the full search query with every page load.

The transient record database key contains the IP of the user. It also has a timeout on it although this is something like 15 or 20 minutes (I can check on that).

So if (a) there was some kind of block on using transients - or - something that removes them quickly - then that would throw away the search results. Or (b) if the IP address was blocked we would end up with a non-unique key that could quickly get overridden by another user making a search with different row counts.

Understand I am shooting in the dark here. Since V5 was released in February 2012 this is the first report of this kind so it is clearly not a general issue. i think you will find the results of a search on this site are working just fine. So I am trying to figure out what could screw it up.

YELLOW

SWORDFISH

Dave Rodenbaugh

Member

Offline

Sep 13, 2013 - 6:19 pm

OK, so on your advice, I deactivated Wordfence, flushed the cache and tried it...sure enough, search pagination works!

So what precisely would they be blocking here, since I will need to contact the author of Wordfence to find out what they need to allow me to configure to have both plugins work together.