suchprettyeyes's dashboard

David,

A slightly inconclusive update here but it may be of use to any other PBWiki users based in UK Higher Education or Further Education institutions. Although the wiki access looked like a PBWiki issue earlier this week more sites have subsequently been effected and wider reports have been received of connection problems.

The network problems now appear to be either at a high network level and probably outside the UK. The problem is now being investigated by JANET (the high speed HE network for the UK) and is therefore definitely a wider, and eccentrically variable, fault.

Many thanks for your help, apologies for assuming this was a PBWiki issue and I hope this extra info is of potential use to other UK HE/FE PBWiki users who may also have been having problems this week.

Thanks,
Nicola

David,

Thanks for that. I will do that if it happens again. It may be a problem outside either my organization or pbwiki's control. I spoke to our network people today and they think it may be a network issue possibly outside of the University (in which my team is based) and/or possibly related to a dodgy router somewhere between us and you. PBWiki came back again after about 90 mins so I'm sure if others were having problems they would have reported an outage of that length. That makes me think it is a relatively local issue here. Should the same thing happen tomorrow though I'll send through a traceroute just in case... Tracking this stuff down is proving to be problematic as the problem itself is rather erratic!

Thanks,
Nicola.

This same problem seems to be occurring again this morning. I am wondering if it's a network load issue as it is around the same time of day (yesterday it was from 10.30am ish for about half an hour. Today we've noticed the problem at 10.51am) so I am looking into this at our end. The rest of the web seems to be fine which does make me wonder if it could be a temporary load issue specific to pbwiki?

The message I am receiving is:

"Network Timeout

The operation timed out when attempting to contact suncatest.pbwiki.com.
The requested site did not respond to a connection request and the browser has stopped waiting for a reply.
* Could the server be experiencing high demand or a temporary failure? Try again later.
* Are you unable to browse other sites? Check the computer's network connection.
* Is your computer or network protected by a firewall or proxy? Incorrect settings can interfere with Web browsing.
* Still having trouble? Consult your network administrator or Internet provider for assistance."

I also have no luck when I try pinging pbwiki from the command prompt - I receive a request timed out message at every stage. Pinging other sites is successful which is why it doesn't appear to be a local issue for us (or a problem with international connections as other US based sites are working) but perhaps a general routing issue and/or possibly a loading/connection/routing issue at or near your end?

Thanks for this. The problem was earlier today (around 10.30am UK time) and it seemed to resolve itself in about 40 mins. It is possible that there was some sort of ISP issue for a short while - is this possible to check after the fact or would I need to have chased that whilst I was having problems accessing the wiki?

I have noted that the blog is independently hosted in case of any future problems.

This seems to have happened again - my wiki is down as is the pbwiki page so I have no access to information about what's happening. Get Satisfaction was also unavailable earlier though so I am hopeful the problem will be resolved soon.

Is there any way that information about system outages can be transmitted? I am assuming this is not scheduled and am wondering if there is any way that basic system outage (scheduled and not) messages can be made available from a site hosted elsewhere (and therefore not prone to the same power outages etc)?

ditto! That sounds incredibly useful!

I am having problems today with my wiki (yes the same one as before) being intermittently fine, and then broken.

I have done a traceroute and it looks like all the hops are fine until so-2-1-0.mpr1.sjc2.above.net (64.125.26.229) which maps to San Jose, CA according to GeoTrace (http://www.nabber.org/projects/geotrace). That makes me think that, on this occassion at least, the issue is at the PBWiki end.

Have you any ideas as to what the problem is/has been or resolutions for this?

The wiki seems to be working at the moment again btw - this is because it has taken me an hour to post this properly on GetSatisfaction which was also down for a long while (haven't been able to track where that problem was occurring though).

Is there any chance that the self-service API activation can be added to the version 1 pbwikis? I need to get the api activated for my wiki suncatest.pbwiki.com

David,

Have just been looking over search again on our wiki. Firstly the links to report feedback are still - as per my previous comment- doing nothing.

The search itself seems to be bringing back slightly fewer results (which is good) but the changes to how search terms are prioritized in the results still seems less than fabulous. It seems that they are being prioritised left to right so results including the first word in a searched for phrase is shown first, results featuring multiple words follow, results featuring the last words are shown last. Using inverted commas/quotes does only partly gets around that as this will only search for an exact phrase. The results for specific phrases in inverted commas/quotes does seem to be working substantially better though which is super ;)

Finally it seems that the names of pages are still not being included in searches which is really frustrating. I would expect page names to be indexed as it is obviously not very efficient to locate pages through the All Pages link for large wikis (indeed it is also especially slow and difficult to do this on large wikis) and it is sometimes necessary to search for pages particularly when they are not used very often and/or need a small quick change....

Many thanks,
Nicola.

David,

The changes coming this weekend sound super. I'll have a good play with them early next week and post any feedback here.

The \"not all results are included\" message will, I hope, be made fairly irrelevant with the changes to the algorithm (so there may be more matches but hopefully the one we want will rank high on the list and be displayed anyway). At the moment we have just under 1300 pages on our wiki which is quite a lot but not massive I would think but I'm wondering if having an additional filter/option to search only titles (and possibly headings) and tags of pages would be a faster search based on smallish indexes which might be useful for large wikis like ours?

The search feedback issues (yup, on 1.0 wiki - sorry I wasn't clearer on that before) are still there btw.

On a slightly random side note I've noticed a general disparity in where you go when you click for help/to give feedback since the recent embedding of GetSatisfaction and new walkthrough help area.

When you click help on a wiki page it takes you to the radio button list of help options that eventually lead only to a feedback form. However if you click help on the main pbwiki page you end up in this GetSatisfaction area which is often extremely useful even if just for searching through other people's feedback and problems. Is there a reason the walkthrough area (http://pbwiki.com/help.php) doesn't sit at the top of the GetSatisfaction area (http://help.pbwiki.com/helpstart.php) or at least link to it?

Thanks!

David,

Many thanks for the detailed response - it's taken me a few days to reply as I wanted to answer each element.

**"Dead links" issue**

Clicking on "Don't like our new Search? Help us make it better."

Leads to (http://suncatest.pbwiki.com/report.ph...) which has the text:

"Home » PBwiki Search Feedback
Report Search Feedback Previously Fixed Issues Known Issues"

Those three terms at the bottom are links but they all link back to the same content-free (except for text above) page:

Report Search Feedback
http://suncatest.pbwiki.com/report.ph...

Previously Fixed Issues
http://suncatest.pbwiki.com/report.ph...

Known Issues
http://suncatest.pbwiki.com/report.ph...

For reference I am browsing my wiki on Mozilla Firefox v. 3.0.1 which is usually ok with pbwiki but does behave differently from IE sometimes (particularly on issues of layout, not usually content).

***Scoring of search result***

Thanks for that information. I assumed this was a new algorithm that was being tinkered with. You mentioned that the title of pages is taken into account and that interests me as my colleague and I have both had a real challenge to search for pages even if using the exact page title.

I would also suggest that a normalised version of the title of pages would be useful to search against as I would perhaps not recall whether there was a hyphen, an underscore or think to replace a space with a %20 etc. if I was searching for a page by title.

***Number of results***

A new message now appears on, it seems, all or most searches. Above the results the text "Note: Due to the large size of your wiki, not all results are included. Please try again later." is shown. This is nice to know but pagination and easier browsing through results would be super. I can think of several ways in which I would prefer priorities to be ranked but roughly I'd think I'd expect results in about this order:

1) pages with (exact) search string in title
2) pages with (exact) search string in tags
3) pages with (exact) search string somewhere on the page
4) pages with all search terms somewhere in the title/tag or page
5) pages with either/or any of the search terms somewhere in the title/tag/page.

***Some transatlantic translation****

yes. Inverted commas = " " = quotes. My American partner and I had a protracted chat about this and we are both sure that our own way is best. But since you are based in the US I shall take her advise and stick to "quotes" next time ;)

***Your list of things to do****

>So, specific things for me to work on:
>1) Exact matches on pages should always come first (agreed, wise, easy)

Sounds super.

>2) More highly score terms that appear next to each other, even when not in a quoted phrase search.

Also sounds ace.

Many thanks again - I'm very happy to give feedback especially if it will help make pbwiki even better! :)

- nicola.

A little P.S. here:

I tried to report these issues using the link on the wiki \"Don't like our new Search? Help us make it better.\" but this took me to a page with 3 dead links on it. I was hoping/expecting it would take me to a form, contact details or (I expected) the GetSatisfaction topic for this. Unfortunately it is not.

The wikis are (as I type) up again. Would appreciatte info on what happened to all things pbwiki ish a few minutes back though!

Rachel,

Have sent that to you...

n.

It's a possibility to do this. My concern is that table sorting is still only working on my premium 2.0 wiki not on my free 2.0 wikis (where I've also been trying it) and there are good reasons why, for the moment at least, I would prefer to be able to keep using the free service for this wiki and was not aware that table sorting was a premium feature.

I have a premium PBWiki 2 wiki that the sorting works fine on but I also have standard (ie free) wikis in both original PBWiki and PBwiki 2 varieties that I cannot get that option on. The check box simply isn't present on these other wikis and therefore I cannot enable sorting on the wiki I need it for (an original version 1 wiki).

Please could you let me know if this is only possible on Premium wikis? Also is it only on PBWiki2 or on the original PBWikis.

Thanks,
Nicola.