Errors

[daemoth]

In the "edit profile" page, some of the text is black, making it hard to read with the Dark ressource theme.

[Davy Jones]

http://www.spriters-resource.com/playsta...teraskasi/
The game is actually called Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi

[puggsoy]

Unsure if somebody already changed it to what it may have been before, but it was missing the umlauts so I added them. That's one great thing about the new icon system, I'm pretty sure the text can contain any unicode characters (which the icon maker probably wouldn't).

[Petie]

The text can in fact contain any unicode character but we tend to shy away from them for search purposes. See Pokèmon, for instance. Using the accented e, you won't find it if you search for "Pokemon" so, while technically incorrect, we spell it the latter way for compatibility. I'll wait on second opinions before removing the accents you just added though, especially on a game within the Star Wars series where most people will probably just search for "Star Wars" anyway.

[daemoth]

If the search engine can be modified, it should be modified so that: if you search with a word that contain an accent, it would also give you result of the same work without an accent.

[Petie]

It's something I'd like to look into but, as far as I can tell, the only way to do it would be to programmatically replace any accented character with its non-accented equivalent (and vice-versa) which means a ton of extra checking. It's especially difficult in the reverse since we'd need to basically check every e, for instance with è, é, ê, ë, and so on. It's not as simple as it would be if we were letting people search Pokèmon and then just stripping the accent.

[Jermungandr]

[daemoth]

 It's especially difficult in the reverse since we'd need to basically check every e, for instance with è, é, ê, ë, and so on. It's not as simple as it would be if we were letting people search Pokèmon and then just stripping the accent.

We dont need to do the reverse, when a search is made, the accent are removed from both the game name and what is searched by the user.

[Petie]

But removing from the results means checking for every iteration of every character before the search is made. There's no way to just remove the accent from the game name. You need to tell it what character to look for and what to replace it with.

[daemoth]

Well, the accents doesnt have to be removed when the search is made, it can be made when the game name is modified and then stored in a second variable which then used with the search rather than the original game name.

[Dazz]

[Jermungandr]

There is a simple solution to your accents problem. All you have to do is add an additional simple variable to your database. Basically you would have two variables for each game title; one for the name displayed in the icon, and one hidden one for searches.

For example, if someone created a game section for a game called "Pokèmon: Brown Version", the database would store two versions of the name:

[[Visible Name]]: Pokèmon: Brown Version
[[Hidden Name]]: Pokemon: Brown Version

It would be extremely simple to set it up to do this automatically.

Then, when someone performs a search for a word that contains an accent, it just has to quickly strip the accent from the search request and perform the search in the Hidden Name table rather than the Visible one.

And since most games don't have accents attached to them, creating the second variable to your database table should be a piece of cake, since you literally just need to tell it to copy the existing name column, and then go back and edit the few games that need the accents.

[Petie]

Yes, I've considered a second column but it's a ton of redundant data to solve a relatively minor problem so I haven't entirely decided whether or not it's worth it yet.

[Jermungandr]

Redundant perhaps, but of all the possible fixes it's the one that offers the fastest search results.

Another option is to have every game name load into an array with the accents stripped every time a search is performed, and then strip any accents from the search request and perform the search on that array.

It's faster than checking every possible accent combination for every game, but slower than the method I gave previously.

[Petie]

Redundant perhaps, but of all the possible fixes it's the one that offers the fastest search results.

Another option is to have every game name load into an array with the accents stripped every time a search is performed, and then strip any accents from the search request and perform the search on that array.

It's faster than checking every possible accent combination for every game, but slower than the method I gave previously.

That would be brutally slow. The second column is likely the most efficient way to do this. I just don't know if the very small number of cases where it matters justifies it. People have no problem finding the content as it stands now and, though I always prefer to be as accurate as possible, the lack of accents doesn't make the titles unrecognizable.