Good morning everyone.
I have been thinking through the night, as I do.. and rather than make another announcement or discussion, as this is of course very apt - I am going to use this thread to explain a bit more about the member search page, how to use it, what happened to it and why and what we will be doing in the future as this question has been asked before.
As with most searches in web design, ours is no different and uses queries from the database and then will show (yield) results based on that. So if I typed in or selected I am searching for a male female couple (Couple-MF) then the page will show exactly that. A couple male female. Same with all other options.
Additionally with this, you have location search - this is extremely accurate and will display all members based on your search terms (keywords). So if I typed in Liverpool, it will display all members who have elected to put their location down as Liverpool. Same for Manchester, Kansas US and HMP Broadmoor
So this is highly accurate, same as couples, single gents, single ladies etc.. but completely dependant on the members making sure they added the correct information.
What's broken and why?
Well, recently I rolled out huge changes as you may remember but at the same time introduced a glitch on the page. The changes were adding transexual (TS), adding 'Interested in Meeting' and also adding Sexual Orientation/ Persuasion: such as 'Pansexual' or 'Bi-Sexual'.. These changes started in February and the glitch was discovered in March.
The glitch means that page 2 in the member search will load the members from A-Z instead of your search filters. It also means that searching things like Couple-MF who are also Bi-Sexual, will also not load fully on to page 2.
It's something we are acutely aware of and will be of course fixing.
However, fixing things on this scale will take a little time because of not only the time it takes to rebuild, but also development costs involved in redeveloping the search page. This bug is not something that can be fixed easily, so we need to redesign and rebuild a new member search engine
completely.
Development on this scale is not only time consuming, but hugely expensive due to the nature of the development involved. But it will be done and as mentioned in yesterday's announcement with regards to location field expansion, I have been working on it for some time, but we need to rebuild an entire search engine. Both complex and very costly.
TLDR? ;
So to reiterate, introducing extra search tools recently such as Sexual Orientation, Interested in meeting etc while hugely beneficial - they also introduced a glitch which we discovered shortly afterwards.
As a result the page will need to be completely rebuilt and re-indexed, a both time consuming and very costly job indeed..
Remembering, it will still search results based on all searches, but only one line per time. Location searching will be the best way to search of course..
That said searching a couple male female and bisexual, works. So those two fields will get results (Using the site as a Lady/Gent or Couple etc?:Sexual Orientation/ Persuasion
I hope this helps explain things as clearly as possible and answers some questions relation to this.
Many thanks all!