The search function on this forum is really frustrating. I have pages and pages of search results for my query, and I can access only one or two before I see the above error.

Is there any hope of having this fixed?

I use the search extensively myself every day and never had such a problem, so can't fix what I can't reproduce.

Very true. I get this on both Firefox and IE consistently.

Anyone else get this or is it only me?

I've seen it a few times randomly in the past (not lately). But I'm sure that doesn't help anyone solve it... :)

This just started showing up for me today.

Example:

1. Go to search page.
2. Enter "mapping" as a search term. (Something that returns a lot of results.)
3. Hit Search.
4. First result page shows up fine. Scroll down and click the page "2" link.

Error message is displayed.

As long as we're talking about the search page, I have a request just in case someone is still hacking up the PHP. This is an annoyance in phpBB that I've never been able to understand, and I'm not sure how much effort would be involved in changing it.

Currently there are two search options:
* Search topic title and message text
* Search message text only

It is far more likely that someone would want to "Search topic titles only" instead of this second option.

I only get it on the Next link!

Totally agree.

Ok, I can reproduce it. However, nothing in the source has changed, or in the database, that could trigger this. In fact, nothing has changed at all I can detect. So I have to leave it broken until I've got a day to waste on PHP again.

It only appears with > 6000 (more or less) results. I can not say if this problem every existed before because I never try to page in such a result, I always restrict my search more.

I can recreate it with 1627 results, found with 'row not found constraint'. I got 3 pages through.

Anyway, thanks for checking again and responding.

I found a lot more reports of this on the phpbb forum, and yes, the search system is broken with large results. There is no reaction from anyone responsible and there is a repeating pattern that the temp storage of search results in the database is f***ed.

After looking at the code, which is the usual quality, I can confirm that this is probably buggy. I won't fix it though, as I promised myself never to touch 5 level 10 screens long if/then/else PHP code again. Sorry guys... there is no way in PHP to "show_sql" or to do any kind of logging or tracing. Debugging is basically done using die("I'm here now!") for breakpoints.

Then surely it's time to 'eat your own dog food' :)

Maybe someone would volunteer, given the DB schema?

A good message board written in Java has been an Open Source project waiting to happen for a while now. I keep thinking that I want to do it, but then I get going on something else.