Tech: Mudcat search engine tips

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 16 Apr 21 - 03:46 PM

Remember that the main search engine depends on an index that has to be generated, so the recency of those searches depends on how recently Max updated the index.

There are other search engines on the Old Advanced Forum Search on the quicklinks dropdown menu on most Mudcat pages.

My favorite search engine is the Filter box at the top of the list of threads on the Forum Menu. It searches by thread name, and it's quick and accurate. Use one or two key words in the Filter, and then set the Age back. You can do a secondary search of the results with CTRL-F.

Other search tips in the FAQ.

And if you still can't find it, ask a moderator or start a thread and ask.

-Joe-

Searching Mudcat for Information

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 17 Sep 18 - 01:18 AM

ps. info wanted is not put in brackets

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 17 Sep 18 - 01:18 AM

when I want something from Mudcat, I do a google site search

(info wanted) site:mudcat.org

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: keberoxu
Date: 16 Sep 18 - 07:40 PM

The bug in the mud is back.
Sadly.
I can't search using the Mudcat search feature --
at least, not successfully.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jackaroodave
Date: 27 Oct 17 - 04:51 PM

I'm getting returns, but in some cases more than I asked for. For example:

0.8912 - Thread - Message - RE: new Dave Van Ronk CD - Oct 25 2013 3:29AM - ? Joe Offer
0.8912 - Thread - Message - RE: new Dave Van Ronk CD - Oct 25 2013 3:29AM - ? Joe Offer
0.8912 - Thread - Message - RE: new Dave Van Ronk CD - Oct 25 2013 3:29AM - ? Joe Offer

Most are single, some are duplicate, and this one is triplicate.

I'm using an old iPad, which can't handle a lot of javascript; maybe that's it.

Anyway, it's nothing I can't live with.

Thank you for all your hard work, Max.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: GUEST,keberoxu
Date: 27 Oct 17 - 04:04 PM

I'm the member who opened this thread --

and the Mudcat search engine works for me as well.

Dreadful grateful,
Frankenstein.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Max
Date: 27 Oct 17 - 03:15 PM

worked for me.

---

The same search, On the charlie so long, worked fine for me on 29 Oct, Max. Thannks.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 24 Oct 17 - 09:50 PM

Not working right now, Max. I searched for On the Charlie So Long - no cigar.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Max
Date: 24 Oct 17 - 11:51 AM

I'm making progress. Give it a whirl.

Also, while you are here, can y'all give me an idea of other websites that are resources for folk songs and the like that you also like to visit?

The Google Custom search includes other sites as well. I'm looking to add more sites to it. I already have:

www.csufresno.edu/folklore/
www.thebards.net/music/
maxhunter.missouristate.edu/
folkmusic.about.com
nodepression.com
etymonline.com
thesession.org
traditionalmusic.co.uk
folktunefinder.com

Any other suggestions?

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 22 Oct 17 - 09:08 PM

Somebody emailed me about our missing search engine. This is the response I typed up. Maybe it will help somebody else:

I suppose we could blame it on Google, but it's probably a good thing to do in the long run.
Google has been pushing Websites to adopt https:// security, which is a good thing. It got to the point where Mudcat's owner Max Spiegel decided to go along with Google and increase security, but that meant that Max had to move Mudcat to a new platform. It's a difficult job, and it will take Max some time to get a number of functions back online. The most notable one is the "search" function.
We've always had a number of search engines, and I usually use a variety.
I wrote a description of our various search engines and how to use them in our FAQ: https://mudcat.org/detail.cfm?messages__Message_ID=196922

If you have trouble finding something, give me a holler. I'm pretty good at finding stuff.
-Joe-
[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Mr Red
Date: 21 Oct 17 - 05:40 AM

yea, maybe I had a new computer, or a new iteration of a browser in 2014. My memory isn't that detailed.

Now my Messages since last visit lists 20th onwards, which may be day oriented, not time.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 21 Oct 17 - 04:50 AM

Joe Offer wrote: When the poster submits the message, the special characters are changed into an ampersand code, so it will display properly and reliably. I hope that Max can make that feature work again. It is very important when posting songs in foreign languages.

Until it does you could convert it using this_site.

Delete the Foo stuff and paste the text into the top box. Then copy the bottom box into Mudcat and preview it.

That should fix the current ? problem:
Hall? Orchestra -> Hallé Orchestra

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 19 Oct 17 - 07:34 AM

You're right, GUEST. I was going by my cookie. Maybe something was reset on that date then.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Oct 17 - 06:45 AM

You have an ID cookie and it will contain 20140817. It's your date of joining.

But Mr Red's posting history show that he first posted under that moniker in February '01

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 19 Oct 17 - 05:22 AM

You have an ID cookie and it will contain 20140817. It's your date of joining. I assume that the date of your last visit was initialized to that when your ID record was created in the database.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Mr Red
Date: 19 Oct 17 - 04:07 AM

well wotdooyooknow messages since last visit from the drop-down menu. The problem is my last visit was recorded (in a cookie?) as 17 Aug 2014. I have re-set it to today which seems a bit backwards unless I have set it in motion (never did before) by so doing. I will monitor is to see where it registers my last visit. ie manual, auto from thread page, or "last visit" page.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 19 Oct 17 - 12:39 AM

Now, now, look at the sunny side. This is an excellent opportunity to learn how well our other search engines and the Filter work. Tips for searching are here (click) in the FAQ.

Mudcat has many search tools - see Old Advanced Forum Search (click) in the QuickLinks dropdown menu.

🎼 Keep on the sunny side..... ♬

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: keberoxu
Date: 18 Oct 17 - 10:50 PM

meanwhile,
the search engine still doesn't work,
says the bug in the mud.

Gosh, darn.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Mr Red
Date: 18 Oct 17 - 03:18 AM

let's see - Denary has codes row followed by Hex hash codesrow.

does this work 4 🦊 🤕 ?
or this 4 🦊 🤕 ?

Preview OK
now - let's see which if either survive the 'Cat o' Nine Tales

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 18 Oct 17 - 02:23 AM

Joe Offer wrote: the text was copy-pasted from a word processor

I thought so too, Joe. But the poster mentioned using an iPad, and it was a short post. Is is possible to generate the character ’ on an iPad keyboard?   Just curious.

GUEST,🐸🐹👀👁 wrote: Would this work?...

GUEST,Mud🐱 testing wrote: ...testing...

I wonder whether putting emoticons in usernames - and thefefore possibly into the database indexes, might have some unwelcome effects...?

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 18 Oct 17 - 12:39 AM

DaveRo says, "I notice today that apostrophe is appearing as ? in some posts. So "I'll just add..." appears as "I?ll just add..."."

Those are the curly apostrophes, Dave - so probably the text was copy-pasted from a word processor. The straight apostrophes don't have that problem.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Why can't I use the Mud🐱 search engine
From: GUEST,Mud🐱 testing
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 09:45 PM

Mud🐱 testing

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: GUEST,🐸🐹👀👁
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 09:39 PM

Would this work? 🐸🐹👀👁

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 04:58 AM

I notice today that apostrophe is appearing as ? in some posts. So "I'll just add..." appears as "I?ll just add..."

I wonder if those posts are being composed 'off site' and pasted in, and those are actually 'right single quotes' - "I’ll just add ..." Microsoft stuff had a habit of doing that - 'smart quotes'.

It shows in preview, though.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 03:12 AM

I'll try posting some Chinese lyrics here...

小燕子，穿花衣，
年年春天来这里，
我问燕子你为啥来？
燕子说：“这里的春天最美丽！”

Seems that everything is fine now.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 03:02 AM

Thanks Dave...

I've finally made things work after using hexadecimal &#x codes, i.e. "🐸" for "🐸"... 😂😂😂 Pretty inconvenient I'll admit!

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 02:56 AM

Try again:

😂🤣🐷💕夏腆💞🐗🈵🈹

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 02:45 AM

If I copy Jeri's c-cedilla I get ?

I assume this is work in progress. It looks like the intention is to serve ISO-8859-1 - which includes all these missing characters - and convert anything else - like the dotless i, g-breve, infinity, and emoticons - to &-codes. One of Joe's posts suggested that's what the old system did. Previously the server was using UTF-8.

Part if that's working ;)

Jason: yours is a font problem. You - and I - don't have glyphs for those unicode codes.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 02:34 AM

Nope, the &# codes don't work for me either. Some Chinese characters do show up but not the rest.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 17 Oct 17 - 02:33 AM

I'll try again:
��������夏腆��������

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jack Campin
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 08:10 PM

Absolutely nothing in this thread works for me except Joe's ampersand codes and some of the high-bit characters in DaveRo's Turkish text. When I want to post Turkish or Hungarian I use ampersand numeric codes, they do work here.

for Turkish:

& # 1 9 9 ; Ç
& # 2 3 1 ; ç
& # 2 8 6 ; Ğ
& # 2 8 7 ; ğ
& # 3 0 4 ; İ
& # 3 0 5 ; ı
& # 2 1 4 ; Ö
& # 2 4 6 ; ö
& # 3 5 0 ; Ş
& # 3 5 1 ; ş
& # 2 2 0 ; Ü
& # 2 5 2 ; ü

and Hungarian:

& # 3 3 7 ; ő
& # 3 3 6 ; Ő
& # 3 6 9 ; ű
& # 3 6 8 ; Ű

The other non-ASCII characters in Turkish and Hungarian can be done with alphabetic ampersand codes (which are not too hard to remember).

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 06:06 PM

OK, this is on an alternate Mudcat server, not the new one....

Freut euch des Lebens weil noch das L?mpchen gl?ht Pfl?cket die Rose eh sie verbl?ht!

Man schafft so gerne sich Sorg? und M?h? sucht Dornen auf und findet sie und l??t das Veilchen unbemerkt das uns am Wege bl?ht. Freut euch des Lebens?

Nope, doesn't work, either....

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 05:48 PM

I tried copy-pasting German text from Firefox three different ways, and none of them worked. The umlauts showed up as question marks. The text I used was https://www.volksliederarchiv.de/freut-euch-des-lebens/, which has plenty of umlauts. I copied from the visible text and pasted it into a message box. Then I pasted the same text into an "edit" bos, and then I pasted the source text into an edit box - on all three attempts, no cigar.

But if I use the ampersand code, ü - it will work:

ü

My favorite is the "s-zed ligature," ß - it will work, too:

ß

(done from Firefox)

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jeri
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 05:24 PM

Seems the accents and alt codes are 👎, but the emoticons ought to make some folks 😀. And if you can copy, paste a c cedille, this will be one ç. If it's a question mark, you can't do it.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Bill D
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 05:06 PM

interesting... only the infinity posted, and not the a with umlaut

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Bill D
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 05:04 PM

? ? ? ∞

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 03:40 PM

Let's try that Turkish song again - copied from here:

Ali Babanın bir ?iftliği var
?iftliğinde horozları var
? ??r? ?? diye bağırır
?iftliğinde Ali Babanın

Hmmmm. It doesn't preview coreectly, which it did last time.
The dotless i and the g-breve have been converted to &-codes and appear correctly. The characters that posted correctly last time, such as C-cedilla appear as question marks.

Heres a u-umlaut and a c-cedilla from my keyboard: ? ?

I'll post it...

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 02:06 PM

👍🏼

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 02:05 PM

cheeky winky smiley test:


😜

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jeri
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 12:42 PM

This is a test again: ??? 🙏

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jeri
Date: 16 Oct 17 - 12:21 PM

This is a test: ? 🙏

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: GUEST,maeve
Date: 14 Oct 17 - 01:41 PM

Snuffy- There currently is an ongoing upgrade/server change. From the second post in this thread:

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Acme
Date: 11 Oct 17 - 03:03 PM

Max is in the process of moving Mudcat to a new server and all of the various features aren't in place yet.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Mr Red
Date: 14 Oct 17 - 12:59 PM

looks OK so far, so maybe fixed or random or higher threshold like 65536 (2 to power 16)

emojis live in the stratosphere (128000 ish)

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Mr Red
Date: 14 Oct 17 - 12:54 PM

I think the problem with characters may well be that there is a limit on the numerical length which wasn't there before.

eg hash codes under (say) 1000. Greek seems to end with omega ώ (974) above 1000 it is Cyrillic like Ж

because the preview is controlled by your browser it looks OK. But once stored by Mudcat it is controlled elsewhere.

If the above posts correctly - I would posit a higher number like 9999 maybe - where the emojis live. Having said that I managed (and got a reaction that confirmed) to get emojis to post, that didn't a day later so either the threshold is variable from some bug, or max it still tinkering.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Snuffy
Date: 14 Oct 17 - 12:53 PM

Emoyicons and unicode are all very well, but why are they in this thread. And why can't I use the Mudcat search engine? I just keep getting

500 - Internal server error.
There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 14 Oct 17 - 11:19 AM

PLEASE make unicode characters work again. Everytime I try to post something - song titles, lyrics etc - in Chinese, it ends up in question marks. Very disappointing.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Joe Offer
Date: 14 Oct 17 - 03:55 AM

Off and on, Mudcat has accepted posting of special characters. When the poster submits the message, the special characters are changed into an ampersand code, so it will display properly and reliably. I hope that Max can make that feature work again. It is very important when posting songs in foreign languages.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 13 Oct 17 - 04:10 PM

Close - but not identical. It has made all the i characters identical, and lost the g-breve. The diacritics remaining are all Latin.

That was not what I expected!

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: DaveRo
Date: 13 Oct 17 - 04:02 PM

I wondered whether lyrics in east European languages are affected by this emoticon problem. Turkish has several characters which I expect are double-byte in utf-8.

Below is the first verse of a Turkish children's song "Ali Baba Has a Big Farm" which I found here

Ali Babanin bir çiftligi var
Çiftliginde horozlari var
Ü üürü üü diye bagirir
Çiftliginde Ali Babanin

I don't speak Turkish, BTW, but I did spend some time there and I have vivid memories of trying to make sense of text messages sent to me by mobile operator Turkcell. Note that there are two i characters - with and without a dot.

Subject: RE: Tech: why can't I use the Mudcat search engine
From: Jason Xion Wang
Date: 13 Oct 17 - 02:53 PM

It's not working... Works when I ticked "Preview" but appear again as question marks when submitted.