Here's what I know so far:
Looking at a user's posts
Attempting to view the posts of kphoger (36,795) or Max Rockatansky (32,920) will fail. Scott5114 (24,200) will succeed. However, reloading one that fails will allow it to go through, tested by both TheGinger and myself. Viewing pages past the first will still succeed. This suggests caching is in play.
Searching
The threshold appears to be different for a forum search than looking at a user's posts. Searching (not advanced) from a board seems to have a higher threshold; Great Lakes and Ohio Valley (70,855) succeeds, while Northeast (86,878) fails, tested both yesterday night and right now. However, you can't reload a forum search, as the URL changes.
Anything is considered to narrow the search except for providing a search term. Searching within a board or thread with the "This board" or "This topic" options will narrow it, as will going to advanced search and narrowing it by user, providing an "X days ago" range, or clicking the "search in topic subjects only" option. However, there's something weird that I can't figure out right now; doing advanced search with the only narrowing option being user fails with kphoger, Scott5114, or even myself (16,137); the last two succeed clicking "show posts" from the profile. (It works fine with people far down the list.)
Scott5114 believes that the threshold is different at different times of day, being less likely to 502 in the middle of the night, but I have not experienced this myself. It's mostly deterministic except for certain spikes (the Connecticut News thread 502ed three times in a row for me yesterday and then worked on the fourth attempt despite that thread only having 6,338 posts, way below the threshold). There was one time when I was looking for something within a certain date range from several years ago and it seemed like an 800-day range succeeded and a 1000-day range failed (or similar numbers) where trying the same thing a second time or even shifting from e.g. 2000-2800 to 2500-3300 would never switch from succeed → fail or fail → succeed.
I do not know whether it's just counting posts or if the post length matters. Scott5114 says it's on a timer, but I don't know which way it works.
As a reminder, while this has nothing to do with the brokenness and is intended behavior, any search other than one entirely within a thread or "Show posts" from a user profile will only return one post per thread.
Quote from: hotdogPi on June 09, 2026, 10:05:20 AMAs a reminder, while this has nothing to do with the brokenness and is intended behavior, any search other than one entirely within a thread or "Show posts" from a user profile will only return one post per thread.
Which is rather annoying.
Good Morning, "the AARoads forum" was a 208 month sociological study conducted by Harvard University. We are now complete with our study. Thank you for your time.
I feel like we've been talking about the forum search being broken since 2015
1) It also seems to work better in my PC browser than my phone.
2) I can search those users, if...
A) select the check box for Show results as messages
B) go to Choose boards to search in, or search all, then de-select Check all at the bottom left, and re-select particular subforums. I'm guessing it just can't wade through too many thousands of posts.
As stated, it can't seem to handle a certain upper limit of posts (is 32,768 the magic number?).
Obviously, It's hard to know where a user said a specific post.
AND, and, OR, or are searched as literal terms, not as Boolean operators. For example, searching this and that brings up every post with those three words in the body of the post. Searching "this and that" (include the quotation marks) forces those three words to appear together.
Interestingly, it can search some special characters, but the results are inexact:
For example, one can search -/+ and it will highlight a few of them; yet "-/+" gives a message "Did you forget to put something to search for?" It will also catch a slash/virgule used in a title. For example, I can find searches for stop (a very common term on our forum), and f/stop which will be found as a literal term.
It will find a backslash, but searching \dev will just return a handful of results without the backslash. Searching dev alone gives thousands of responses. So I have no idea what that does, but it tends to find URLs.
Since the searches are literal, wildcard operators like * and ? aren't needed.
Searches must have at least two characters; a single character will produce the result The following term has been ignored in your search because it is too short.
32,768 is not the magic number. I checked this myself since I thought it might be. Searching Max Rockatansky failed even before hitting 32,768.