Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Rp finder refinement

I'm happy with the recent addition of the looking for rp being added to the find rp but it also has its problem. Because of this the list is a lot longer an I think an ability to decline an add for an rp or character might be nice.

What about you guys? Do you agree, do you have other suggestions on how to improve the "looking for" system?

Hi there!

I can see, if you're just perusing, how the lists of RPs could be bothersome.

But that being said, I have to disagree with the idea for one simple reason: you can adjust the settings on the Finder itself, located at the very bottom of the page, so you can find only RPs you're interested in. That helps cut down the clutter considerably and gives you more relevant topics to reply to.

It would be super nice if we could limit the number of RP Finder suggestions to maybe 10 or 15 per page, with a "Next Page" option. Not only do we have more games now, most people put so much text in there they use up the max 500 character limit for the excerpt. On mobile this list is MASSIVE when there is even only 20.

As for Copper's suggestion, on mobile I have to scroll a lot, a lot, a lot, a loooot to even get to the sliders to adjust my search. Even then I like just browsing whatever is available, I'm not always looking for something specific!

Now that I could get behind!

I was even a lil' surprised at first that it didn't split everything in the Finder into multiple pages, given how busy the forums have been as a result of the update.

And that's fine for specific genera but if their's a, let's say post about a horror game and your not interested in horror at all, or maybe it's one where they are only seking male players and you are a differentgender. It would be nice to be able to remove the clutter of rps that you have no interest in instead of seeing them again and again. Or perhaps they can add more refinement to the search options at the bottom of the finding page.

I do agree though that breaking it up into pages as that is very helpful.

Cool discussion!

I haven't done any paging at this time, because when you run a search, results are returned in random order so as to try and put different selections in front of you as often as possible, and not punish still-active threads that were perhaps posted earlier than some others. In other words, I'm trying to defeat the issue of a busy forum pushing still-valid topics off the front page and causing them to go dead, by eliminating chronological ordering. The early reports on this have been very positive, even with the LFRP forum twice as busy as before and routinely dropping topics off the front page before they are even 24 hours old.

The finder returns 20 games, max. Even when there's 50 games available. So if your search criteria are very broad, often times refreshing your search will give you a slightly different selection. On the other hand, if your search criteria were very targeted, it will typically just change the order of the results but not the results themselves.

Here's where paging comes in: this means that breaking it across pages is not very viable, as there's not a good way for me to know what you actually saw on page 1 -- it was random.

As for being able to declare yourself uninterested in a concept and not see it anymore -- this is a really interesting idea that I will keep in mind. But it would require a whole new system to be built and a whole lot of optimizations to keep it from slowing down the finder. So for the present, I'm moving on from major changes to the Finder to see how it works and what can be learned from the current version. And, of course, to give attention to other portions of the site that desperately need attention. Maybe next time, though!

I can see how scrolling to the search options on mobile would be very irritating. I'll play with the number of sample results it shows before a search has been initiated and see what I can do there!

Edit: Sample results before running a search now capped at 4 - 5.

I'm happy and impressed with the administration's involvement and quick response to suggestions. You guys rock.

D'aww, thanks!

That is SO much easier!

Would it be a good idea to add a blurb at the top saying "Refresh to get different results or use the search below"? Cause I had no idea it was limited to 20 and shows different things with each refresh, this is super useful knowledge to know.

Good point

Oh, I forgot to say! Added the blurb as well, when it's appropriate.

I am still really confused about the way it works now, mainly because when I click on "Join RP", I get a list of 4 concepts - which is fine, but they're always the same ones even when I refresh. I didn't realize that you had to actually use the Search in the Finder to get a list of different randomized results until just now when I was playing with one of the settings.

Maybe I'm just too used to the old RP Finder, but it's really annoying having to first search, then keep refreshing and having to confirm that, yes, I want to resubmit the same search I just submitted. Or maybe I'm just the grouchy old knitting lady who doesn't like change.

Sounds like the simple solution to this then is just to have the list refresh when you refresh the page, yeah?

The four sample concepts are not randomized, just search results.

It does - some browsers interrupt and ask you to re-confirm. I can't control this behavior, alas.

I feel like I may be misunderstanding something! Pardon the rambling, but I'm going to walk myself back through the last couple of posts, so please tell me if somewhere along the way I've made a mistake!

Sanne wants the four concepts showed in the Finder--no searches conducted--to be randomized, so she doesn't have to do a search on her phone, right? Because the search list size was an issue in the first place, necessitating only showing four concepts when you first open the Finder page. So to fix that problem, shouldn't those first four concepts shown be able to be randomized too when you refresh the page? When I hit F5 just now, those four concepts did not change.

Seconding what Copper said - just going to the Find RP page without conducting a search (so just clicking this link) is what results in 4 results that do not change no matter how often I refresh. I do get different results at some point, ergo today's 4 concepts are different from yesterday's, but if I hit refresh on that page nothing happens. I just get the same concepts again.

When I go to actively search for concepts, without adjusting anything (so just clicking "Find games!") I get a list of 20 results that do change when I search again and again. It's still a massive pain on my phone so I just don't bother using the RP Finder unless I'm on my computer.

I guess I'm just confused as to why the initial 4 results are static. It seems to defeat the purpose of fetching samples if it's always the same.

The sample results (the first four shown when the page is accessed, but before a search is conducted) are the 4 most recently active topics from the LFRP forum(s). So they do change, but only at the speed of conversation.

I chose to make them semi-static because it lets us cache the main Find RP page for a few minutes to an hour and serve it up faster, with less server/database stress. Main pages get hammered by bots and lookie-loos just seeing what's there, and I wanted to save some cycles by offering a taste of what could be found via that page, rather than serving up fully randomized results (which take longer and require more resources to provide, and can't be cached by virtue of their randomness). As the forums inevitably speed up as more people join, I will likely have to review this and pick a new strategy, but for now it's working as intended.

TLDR; I'm saving the real randomized results for actual people who actually want them, while still trying to show a changing selection of "this is the type of stuff you'll see here." This was an anti-lag decision.

I don't think it's actually changed very much! Search results in the old finder were always limited to 20 random returns. Maybe they seem different now because there are more potential results at any given time, and the sample results seemed more random because people were constantly going online and off?

That makes sense! I didn't realize they were the most recent ones.