Member Blogs Upgraded Some bloggers may have noticed a few minor changes with the blog system over the last few days. Most of the changes are behind the scenes and relate to performance or security, but a couple of other changes are worth mentioning...

If anyone has performed a forum search recently, you may have noticed the lightening fast response! We have implemented a new search engine called Sphinx. It's incredible how fast this thing is! Try it out!

What's even more amazing is that it now allows searching on two letter words. No more problems when searching for k1, j1, PR, etc. However, as with all good things, there's a few caveats....

There will now be a slight delay between a post being made and it showing in the index. This delay will be around 10 minutes or so. Secondly, the ordering of results may not be exactly in date order although a recent post will be given a higher weighting than older posts, it's not guaranteed that date ordering will be exact. This is exactly how most non-forum search engines work, including Google. Finally, a few of the more advanced and little used search features may not be available.

But even with these limitations, the ability to carry out two letter word searches and the amazing speed is more than worth it. Another side benefit is the reduced load that will be placed on the server when multiple people are searching. This will translate into faster performance throughout the site.

The long awaited Wiki is up and running.

For those that have never heard of a wiki, wikipedia defines a wiki as: a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site. A full history of the wiki can be read here. 

The software we chose to use is Mediawiki, the same software that powers wikipedia.org and is probably the most powerful wiki software available. (with the exception of maybe confluence). 

Any forum member has the ability to create and edit pages and we encourage everyone to contribute. Just follow the short tutorial on the Wiki. There's no need to worry about breaking anything as all edits can be reverted to previous revisions.