vBulletin Mods

https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/external/2017/03/29.png

Description

Threadloom Search provides an easy way to upgrade your forum with cloud search. It is 10x faster than vBulletin search. It also gives you image search, spell correction, and WordPress search.

Threadloom Search is now available as a supplemental option to the native forum search

In addition to various fixes and improvements, this update includes a new feature that lets your forum members choose (and save) Threadloom Search or your native forum search engine as their default search engine. You no longer have to choose between the two – your members can have both. As an admin, however, you are able to set either option as the default search engine for new visitors to your forum. You can learn more from our blog post here.

If you’d like to learn more about this feature please check out our Help Center articles:

• Allow users to choose their search engine
• Set default search option

Examples

Threadloom is installed on 1000+ forums with 500M posts, including: 4x4 Community SA, Air Rifle SA, AULRO, AZ Billiards, Baby Bargains, BayouShooter, Fiat Forum, FreedomCardBoard, Golden Skate, Muscle Mecca.

Compare Threadloom vs. vBulletin search in real-time on AZBilliards.

— Alan Fields, owner of Baby Bargains


Features

Computer vision-based image search
Finds images even if the search term isn't in the title, metadata, or post.

Spell correction
Fixes typos and word breaks, and recognizes popular brands and slang.

Custom search tabs
Lets you configure tabs that automatically search over your WordPress blog, storefront, or any crawlable web page.

Advanced search filters
Restrict by forum, user, tag, or thread prefix, with typeahead suggestions.

Auto-scaling
Doesn't slow down as your forum grows, and doesn't require server upgrades.

Real-time indexing
Adds new posts within seconds.​

Installation

• Register on the Threadloom website.
• Download and install the plug-in.
• Wait for your forum to be indexed (~500K posts/hr).
• Test Threadloom Search privately.
• Enable it in AdminCP.

Mark as Installed at the top of the page to get updates.


Options page

Attachment 156634


Baby Bargains case study

Threadloom is the first cloud search engine designed specifically for forums. Two months after installing Threadloom, searches on BabyBargains.com increased six-fold, while the time to complete a search decreased 90%. Sessions with a site search showed greater engagement compared to the year prior – lower bounce rates, more pages per session, and longer session durations.

For sessions with a search:
Attachment 156064

Read more.


Questions and answers
​

Q: Do you sell or share my data?​
A: No. We will never sell or share your data.​
​
Q: Do you offer a free version?​
A: Yes. Threadloom Search is free for sites with up to 10M posts – no credit card required!
​
Q: How do you make money?​
A: We charge a monthly fee for larger forums.​
​
Q: Do I have to pay if my members or guests search more?​
A: No. All tiers – free or paid – include unlimited searches.​
​
Q: Do you offer a free trial?​
A: Yes. You can try it for free for 30 days regardless of how large your forum is. If your community has less than 10 million posts, it's free.
​
Q: How is Threadloom Search different from vBulletin Sphinx Search?​
A: Threadloom Search returns 10x more results. It includes image search, spell correction, and WordPress search. It's also easier to perform advanced searches, and easier for you to administer because you don't have to run anything on your server.​
​
Q: What if your servers go down?​
A: We're built on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, which are fairly reliable. If they do hiccup, Threadloom Search automatically fails over to native search.​
​
Q: Do you observe my theme settings?​
A: Yes. You can also override colors with RGB or hex values.​
​
Q: Is your UI responsive?​
A: Yes. Check out the example links above from whichever device you prefer, or see the attached mobile screenshots.​
​
Q: Do you search over non-forum parts of my site?​
A: Yes. We do this through Custom Search Tabs, meaning that the parts of the site need to be crawlable / visible to search engines.​
​
Q: Does the plug-in work for vBulletin 3.x?​
A: Yes.​ Please see our listing here.
​
Q: How do I modify the vBulletin 4.2.x sidebar on Threadloom Search result pages?​
A: Yes. This requires an additional modification. You can find the instructions here.​

i don't understand exactly the aim of this addon
how it works ? does it supprot Arabic language

This plug-in replaced your native search engine with a powerful, easy-to-use, cloud-based search engine, that makes it easier for your users to find the best content in your forum.

Search controls are in English, but Arabic post content should be fine.

Installed and, so far, seems to be working quite well on 4.2.3

What happens after the 30 day free trial expires?

It's free for as long as your forum has 25K monthly actives or fewer. If your forums is or grows above that, there are paid options. Every subscription – free and paid – includes unlimited posts and unlimited searches.

Okay...that wasn't clear to me...and I'm only trying to make sure our site policies are observed. :)

I do want to mention (for the benefit of others) that the installation on my local dev site consistently timed out, and I had to increase the maximum execution time by entering the following line in my "includes/config.php" file:

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

Once the product is installed (if you need this), then comment it out.

I would also like to say that the install for this product is very nicely and professionally done, with no need to manually upload any files to the server. :up:

I know I have gotten many complaints from my users regarding the intrinsic vB search engine, and I will be looking into this as an alternative. Thank you for sharing. :cool:

Will this work on a local server? I had to enter the information from the public site I help admin, but it doesn't seem to work on my local server. I generally test things on my local server before going "live" with them. :D

Yes, this will work on a local server provided it can make a secure connection to our servers. Feel free to PM me or email me at support at threadloom dot com and I'm happy to take a closer look.

Before enabling Threadloom, we need to create your index. The first sync usually takes 6-12 hours. (We’ve designed the plug-in to not interfere with other operations, e.g., scheduled tasks, backups.)

Nice tweak, installed!

https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/external/2017/03/18.png
Could you fix that?
I'm using vB 4.2.4

EDIT: Whole board has been broken after uninstalling this mod. I suppose this should not happen....

@seb5594: Thanks for the report. There are no references to "Notif" in our code and our threadloom.php file has fewer than 400 lines. Is it possible another user/process overwrote the file?

Please define exactly what this means.

i.e. what exactly is a "monthly active user" ?

As defined by Google Analytics. We have some more info on this on our website at https://www.threadloom.com/pricing (scroll down to Pricing FAQs).

All that states is ;
It doesnt define what that count is actually counting.

From https://support.google.com/analytics...6171863?hl=en:

"30-Day Active Users: the number of unique users who initiated sessions on your site or app from January 1 through January 30 (the entire 30 days of your date range)."

I have more than 25 000 uniques monthly, but they usually don't use search (I mean, not all of them use search function). So, what do you count? My uniques, or people who would use search function and come from my site?

The former (monthly uniques for the site). We chose this instead of users who search, in order to get everyone on the same page around growing your forum, and to prevent turning search into something that has to be rationed (b/c we believe search is good!).

BTW, I just shared this with some other forum admins, but wanted to clarify:

You can install and run Threadloom on your forum w/o making it visible to all of your users. You can hit the Threadloom URL on your site directly, which is a way for you and your trusted members to try it out first before making a decision on whether to turn it on for all users. If you don't like it – at any time, before or after you turn it on for your users – you can uninstall the plug-in with one click and everything will go back to how it was before. So in short, we tried to make it:

• Easy to install: 2 min. plug-in install (then let it index in the background)
• Easy to test: Private URL to try it out
• Easy to uninstall: 1-click uninstall

Your FAQ states that the user group search permissions are respected but it is unclear if forum permissions are. Will Threadloom return results from a forum that the searcher does not have access rights to?

Forum permissions are also respected. Threadloom will not return results from a forum that the searcher does not have access rights to.

What is the cost if one goes over 25,000...

If you visit their site you will see that, its not a topic for discussion here.

Understood

Does anyone have this installed and care to share the link so we can see it?

Here are some examples that don't require a login:

https://www.turbodieselregister.com/...ery=ford+f-150
https://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/thre...?query=gallery
https://coffeeforums.co.uk/threadloo...hp?query=beans

:up:

So far so good, it's a really big improvement on Vb's native search.

sounds interesting...i dont understand search stuff so much...ive installed sphinx before but am i right this is more of an alternative? or something that would be used along with sphinx...

thanks sounds great either way

You can use it either way. The Threadloom plug-in routes all standard searches via your new cloud search index. Advanced searches will go through whatever you have installed today on yoru forum, whether sphinx or native vBulletin search.

I like this but it suddenly stopped working after a couple of days. I see the following message in admincp: "Your account name or access key is invalid".

This happened soon after upgrading to the latest version of the plugin but whether it is related to that I have no idea.

PM me your account name and I'll take a look. We had some sites that fell outside of our community standards and it's possible the notifications didn't get through.

Yeah, I see the email now. What my site covers in no way goes against any of your guidelines - not a single one. It would be interesting to see why you thought that it did. PM me if you like. Anyway, thanks for the generic email and you may now go ahead and delete my forum id from your system as I am unable to do so through the control panel. Cheers.

I dont see anything in the first post about needing to meet some "standards".

I've updated the mod listing with a link to our community standards.

We just set up a demo with BabyBargains.com, so you can try out Threadloom side-by-side with vBulletin standard search. Feel free to give it a go!

http://go.threadloom.com/bb-bunkbed

I just tried to uninstall this and it deleted my main forum index.php

That happened to me on one of the sites I help admin, and it took quite a bit of time to figure out what happened. And I'm still getting an issue in the AdminCP...when I try to visit "Options" I see the forum home page instead.

Threadloom, any idea what I need to restore to get the "Options" link working correctly again?

@z3r0 and @MarkFL - Thank you for alerting us. I’m really sorry about this. We’ve identified the issue and have pushed a new release (version 2.0.4) that resolves the problem. I’m sending both of you private messages to follow up individually so we can make this right.

Thank you for following up on this...the issue seems to have corrected itself. :)

Hi,
i test it on an Demosite (coffeeforum). but i see that the threadloom Search only work with the simple search, not with the advanced search :)

Hi @MrD - that's correct. For now advanced searches will continue to go through whatever you have installed today on your forum. We do support several advanced search operators in Threadloom search.

i try to install the mod on vb 4.2.3 and i got an error
XML Error: Not well-formed (invalid token) at Line 1

Hi @Naijasite - can you send me a PM or email [email protected] with your forum URL so our team can take a look?

Hmm ...

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_SJ_1F1Y/
vs.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_2R_1F4K/

Both tests were done from a test location in California while our servers are located in Germany, we are using HTTPS and babyforum.de is about 2.8 times bigger than Baby Bargains (which does not use HTTPS) - shouldn't your product be a lot faster than our search?

Hi @Andreas - Threadloom will load faster than vB search on most forums, but I'm guessing that you're running on a pretty fast server. The nice thing is that Threadloom is easy to install and you can demo before going live. We've added a side-by-side preview mode that allows you to run a search in Threadloom and your legacy search simultaneously and watch the results load next to each other. You can see what it looks like on Baby Bargains.

Beyond speed, Threadloom has a bunch of other benefits like scaling to your search traffic (no spinning up additional servers when your traffic spikes), reducing your server traffic + associated costs, and spellcheck - ex: search for Maxi Cozi on Baby Bargains suggests Maxi Cosi but returns 0 results with standard search. And we're adding more...

Hope you'll give us a try. We like working with users, so let us know if you're interested and we'll be happy to talk through any questions you have.

Hey threadloom,
could you update your plugin for vbulletin phrases? Would be nice to translate it.

@seb5594 - thanks for the suggestion. We'll look into it, but translation is definitely on the roadmap either way.

Not to shame the developer or anything but there is currently a security issue with this plugin which allows any visitor to access any piece of content (thread, post, etc) stored in their database - the plugin does not currently honor vBulletin 4.x's permissions.

I wrote about the details here: https://www.rdforum.org/showthread.php?t=62245

As I wrote in that post:

The threadloom team has been in contact with me and are working swiftly to resolve the issue, just wanted to make sure other forum admins who aren't necessarily keeping an eye on their system have the latest information.

As a side note, the time that I have spent using the threadloom plugin I've seen a pretty well performing search engine, and the developers are extremely friendly and active and it really does seem like a great product to replace the aging vBulletin search core, if anyone had any thoughts about any of that. I'll be re-enabling the product on my own forum once the issue has been addressed.

Update: Developer confirms patch has been published and thus the issue resolved.

@xyd: Just wanted to thank you for reporting this issue and offer a brief summary for other admins. The issue affected vBulletin sites that had private forums that were viewable and searchable, but whose thread content were not viewable. Prior to Friday’s fix, it was possible for threads from those forums to show up in Threadloom search snippets. As soon as we confirmed the bug, we updated the Threadloom backend to stop sending search results to vBulletin customers, in order to trigger an automatic failover to standard search. We released an updated plug-in (v2.0.8) a few hours later. We've notified affected customers; all new sign-ups will receive the latest version of Threadloom. Protecting privacy is very important to us and we will work hard to prevent this from happening again.

Excited to announce our new filters UI in v2.0.8!

1. Users can now easily filter by forum, user, and date.
2. Results update in realtime.
3. Supports type-ahead.

Demo at http://windsorpeak.com/vbulletin/thr...trollers+twins.

Filter drop-down:
https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/atta...1&d=1495641300

Multi-select + type-ahead:
https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/atta...1&d=1495641334

Date-picker:
https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/atta...1&d=1495641300

Filters in use:
https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/atta...1&d=1495641300

I no longer see the sidebar with the categories?

Hi @RichieBoy67 - we moved this under the 'forum' filter.

I see that but now there is a big empty space where the categories used to be..

Hm, you shouldn't see empty space where the categories box used to be. Results should be left aligned like you see here. I PMed you to follow up on your site if you want us to take a look.

The new drop-down style has a few advantages over the left-side pane that we hope you'll like.

• Multi-select support so you can search for posts across multiple forums at the same time
• Live editing so you can add and remove forums without clicking back
• Text-input with type-ahead so you can search for a forum more quickly

2.0.9 – released 2017-06-08

This release addresses an issue with display of Latin-1 characters, and includes improvements for scheduled task data transfers.

Improvements

• Handle rare cases where the size of posts exceeds HTTP transfer limits.
• Reduce size of data sent by server during scheduled task run. Results in faster task run-time.

Fixes

• Fixed display of Latin-1 characters in the header and footer of the search results page.
• Fixed how we query for the number of table rows when the scheduled task runs.

Full release notes

Image search is now available for all Threadloom customers.

• If you’re already using Threadloom, just install the latest plug-in from the Threadloom Portal (v2.0.6 or later for XenForo, v2.0.8 or later for vBulletin). Then, in the Portal, go to Search Settings and turn on Image Search. Just like with its sister feature, Custom Search Tabs, there is no additional charge for Image Search – they’re both included in your plan. So search on and let us know what you think!
• If you haven’t tried Threadloom yet, sign up here. It’s completely free for smaller forums, and all of our plans for larger forums include a free 30-day trial.

Attachment 156485

Attachment 156486

Full blog post

Threadloom Site Search is working well on my site http://www.spyidea.com/threadloom/th....php?query=seo

I would like to use Threadloom search box to replace default Vb serch box. But i want the searchbox to be below my Navbar. i want the serchbox to be as wide as Threadloom search box.

Please any procedure to achieve this?

Caps request time to ensure that site performance does not degrade due to API backend latency or outages.

Improvements

• Real-time index update API request length is capped so forum visitors don't experience delays when saving changes.

Fixes

• Corrects an error message sent to Threadloom when the plug-in cannot properly encode data.

Full release notes

Hi @Naijasite: You can find instructions for adding a Threadloom search box to non-search pages in vB4 here: https://support.threadloom.com/hc/en...s/115010335228

Am I doing something wrong here? Installed the Product, used the code provided to add the search bar... when I perform a search I get the default vb search page. Plugin is installed, all info is correct, and active.

Hi concepts, this will only work after your site has been indexed. I'll send you an email so we can take a closer look at your account.

Thank you, just got the email. Responded. Appreciate the prompt response.

All is good and working! It looks amazing!

On Monday we released a plug-in update (v2.0.11) that includes a minor backend update to support Threadloom Newsletter and adds compression. Compression saves 80% of bandwidth and 5-10% of sync time. v2.0.11 can be downloaded from the Threadloom portal. Full release notes.

During the installation an error appears. how to fix?

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

Hi inmart - I sent you a private message so we can take a closer look at your account.

Replied in pm

Just wanted to take a second to give this tool a big thumbs up. Incredibly easy to install, site crawled within 24 hours as advertised, amazingly accurate search results. Leaps and bounds improvement over the crappy vBulletin search option.

Very impressed!

I second this

my site took about 30 hours, but it was still around 500k posts an hour. Plus given the ability to add customized search results is going to make a big difference overall


Kudos to Paul at Threadloom for wonderful communication during this process.

also must say after taking a peek on this i agree with what others are saying and encourage everyone to take a look if you havent already.....in particular any image sites that want searchable content, can be a bit of a game changer.

smooth install and great support as well....nice work :)

really great to see....things like this modern addition is even more towards what is making vb4 surpass vb5 functionality and keeping it one of the best platforms to build off these days.

thank you :)

There will be an update in just a few weeks. Thank you!

For a large forums, is better than digitalocean spinsh search?
What about "last threads of a user"?

I'm not exactly familiar with what you are referring to, sphinx search by chance? Can you link me to some more documentation.

That said, most of the forum searches are not as tweaked and user focused due to the complexity of Search itself. With Threadloom Search you have all the tweaks and user focused content built in.

For the "last threads of a user" that still will relay on your server/site to retrieve that. You can search by user with our add-on, you can modify the templates to do what you are asking to do.

Would love to give you a demo, would you like to test it out?

2.0.13 – released 2018-07-05
Adds support for List Builder and includes an AMP-friendly change. Fixes an issue with expanded cards in search, and in the plug-in XML.

New

Adds support for List Builder.
Changes

Improves compatibility with AMP by not loading JavaScript on AMP pages.
Fixes

Fixes an issue with expanded cards in search. There is still a known issue when filtering by certain usernames. This will be addressed in a future release.
Fixes default values in the plug-in XML.

Over the past week, some customers have reported slow search speeds with Threadloom Search. We've reproduced the issue and can confirm that this is an issue with our infrastructure.

Over the past year, Threadloom Search has grown rapidly to serve tens of millions of users. As a result, we have been migrating to a more scalable solution that combines Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Elastic Cloud.

As part of this migration, some customers are experiencing faster search speeds, while others have been impacted by configuration and production issues that have resulted in slow search speeds. This occurs primarily during US daytime hours.

We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. In addition to tackling the aforementioned issues, we are in the process of quintupling the number of cores in our deployment.

As we work through this issue, you may notice some delays to real-time indexing, and periodic interruptions to your cloud sync. This is normal, but if you have any concerns or questions, feel free to reach out to us via email or chat. We will also post updates here as we make progress.

In the meantime, if your site is affected by slow search speeds, please feel free to toggle Threadloom Search off in the your Admin Control Panel (Options > Threadloom). However, we would like to ask customers to continue to keep cron jobs active, in order to help us with our troubleshooting.

Finally, for all paying customers of Threadloom Search, we are issuing credits to cover the rest of 2018 (this month and next month).

We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience and understanding.

hello,
i had this installed and working nicely on a project.....then we moved to a new server and url...
i still have some random fixing of everything to do, but i might need some help with this one...

for one thing, i assume some of the infos @ portal.threadloom.com would need to be changed...however the page is giving me a 404....

how can i change the url?

thank you

I hope we were able to help you IggyP.

We are looking for some feedback on our latest offerings with Search and Newsletter. Would anyone be interested in testing a few items out for us?

Threadloom Search is now available as a supplemental option to the native forum search

In addition to various fixes and improvements, this update includes a new feature that lets your forum members choose (and save) Threadloom Search or your native forum search engine as their default search engine. You no longer have to choose between the two – your members can have both. As an admin, however, you are able to set either option as the default search engine for new visitors to your forum. You can learn more from our blog post here.

If you’d like to learn more about this feature please check out our Help Center articles:

• Allow users to choose their search engine
• Set default search option

I've found a bug - if you search for all posts by a user (returns a vb search by default) then select "Switch to threadloom search results" it returns a blank query.


Edit - on further examination, threadloom_shell template has been coded using vbulletin3 syntax - <if instead of <vb:if etc.

Also any chance of getting {vb:raw headinclude_bottom} included so I don't have to edit it in when the themplate is updated?

Thanks - for the find will update shortly.

Installation Failed
Sorry, the product encountered an error during installation. More information is provided below to help address the issue.

Error writing application files. Please ensure the . folder and its subdirectories have been CHMOD 0777.


UI: all folder 777

That error will occur when your folders are not 0777. Please check with your host to ensure you the server has that permission.

Threadloom folders 0777.

If the error is the same as before, unfortunately, you may need to uninstall and try the installation again. The plugin will create the folder, and then download the files required. So it's important that server has the ability to do that.