A new forum solution?

• digiltd

• April 26, 2015 at 3:04 am

I love ACF and really appreciate everything that Elliot does for the WP community and also his own little ACF community.

So apologies for the following…. but I have to say I find the forums really… crappy.

Not the content, that is gold. But trying to navigate your way though it is hard to find stuff relevant to what you are looking for.

e.g. I was looking for threads about ‘custom field types’. You can see how I would be swamped with results because nearly every topic has those words in them. There is no obvious way to only search a specific forum….. or am I missing something?

So I am left to scroll through pages and pages of threads in the hope of seeing something that might be relevant.

I expect you are aware of these issues as well as the obvious spam issue.

Combine those two with not using excerpts and with people referencing each others replies in their own replies and you end up with super long pages.

I am not too familiar with BBPress but are there some easy to implement options that would help? Advanced search, topic excerpts and a report link for the spam comments (so your users can help moderate them a bit)

I know the server load on forums can get out of control when you allow for advanced searches. But there must be a bit of compromise.

I just thought I would mention it. I expect you are busy with other projects as well as the regular updates to ACF you are always pushing out. But if you want to put it on your “someday maybe” list, that would be cool.

Thanks

• Jonathan

• May 1, 2015 at 8:10 pm

I’ll 1+ this.

Haven’t needed to use the forums too much since I’ve been using ACF for years and frankly can’t find much help here anymore but when I do search for something it’s a nightmare.

In regards to search performance I think using something like Elasticsearch with elasticpress would really be beneficial.

• Elliot

• May 6, 2015 at 5:38 pm

Hi guys

Thanks for the feedback.

This forum is indeed being neglected at the moment, and I wish it was otherwise.
The reason for which is simply time.

I’m currently chatting to my support team about also taking on the forum, so hopefully I can have more of a presence on here.

As for the advanced search, I’ll definitely consider it.

Please contact our support team for any support questions.
http://support.advancedcustomfields.com/new-ticket

Cheers
E

• Jorson

• December 22, 2021 at 7:54 am

As far as I understand, this topic was created a long time ago, but there is no solution, I think advanced search is not the worst solution, but not the best either. The more settings it has, the worse it will work. It is possible as an option to make subcategories by topics and optimize the menu for selecting a forum section. And regarding the search for suitable information, use more precise keys in order to exclude unnecessary in the output of the result.