Is the current gallery the alleged improvement?
Please, please, please tell me that something went disastrously wrong with the recent gallery improvement, and that you've had to - TEMPORARILY - revert to something you originally created to work on a ZX Spectrum! (Early computer from the last century for those of you not familiar ... gosh, I'm old!)
Before the last update, gallery searchability was pretty poor. Being able to search by only one hashtag meant every search brought up loads and loads of irrelevant (to the searcher) results, a problem exacerbated by the incorrect - in my opinion - tagging by many uploaders. But at least the 'Item Name' search took you more or less straight to what you wanted, albeit with the odd - reasonable - addition. e.g. Typing HILLSIDE VILLA in 'Item Name' brought up all the items, and ONLY those items, that had 'Hillside Villa' in the name. OK, it would also throw up a few lots like 'THE Hillside Villa'. 'Hillside Villa RETREAT', 'Hillside HOLIDAY Villa', etc., and possibly even 'THE Hillside Villa GANG' if someone had decided to use that as a household name and you hadn't first narrowed the search to lots.
After the initial shock of finding the gallery gone - It would, of course, be ludicrous to expect someone would go to the very complicated trouble of, say, replacing "Welcome! We're always excited to see you." on the home screen with a warning that it was going to happen, and when, for a while before hand - I was quite optimistic ... perhaps even a little excited. (I know, I know, EXTREMELY foolish of me!)
Now that the gallery is restored, when I search for 'Hillside Villa' it gives me 'Villa du chef', 'old-New style Villa', snowy villa', Ophelia Villa', 'Villa in Farmhouse Style', 'Villa Búcherwurm' 'Villa Spa & Puppy Resort', 'Villa', 'Villa On The Coast', 'Hillside Highlands', 'Modern Brick Villa', Ophelia Villa', 'Grande Villa' ... That's just the initial screen. I don't expect to live long enough to list absolutely everything. Not one of the first two-hundred entries returned is A 'Hillside Villa', let alone the specific one I'm looking for. It could be, of course, that the creator has deleted it for some reason since I downloaded it. How would I know this though, without scrolling through every single entry? Wrapping the item name in quotation marks - the generally accepted way of saying in a search 'I specifically want this, and only this', has no effect.
So, if this is neither a temporary blip nor a joke in poor taste, and is in fact the new gallery working as it should, please tell me:
1) What, if any, are the front-end improvements in the gallery function, or has functionality for the user been sacrificed for back-end improvements?
2) How do I now find a specific item I've downloaded in the past?
[Note to other users who come to this thread. It's worth searching the hashtag option with the name of the item you're looking for just in case the original uploader had the foresight to add it ... as was luckily the case with the example used above!]
Hi @EA_Cade
Many thanks for the response, and apologies for the delay in responding myself. The thread you've provided a link to provides further links to several specific issue threads (all gallery related). I thought it might be useful for the benefit of anyone who comes to this one looking for an answer / update to highlight the open one for this issue:
'Item Name' search results are not accurate
I can see that I'm far from alone in seeing this as a major issue so I'm disappointed, though not particularly surprised, that the above thread has been dormant for four weeks at the time of writing. I'll mark this thread as 'Solved', even though it most definitely isn't. Anyone looking for the latest on this issue should therefore go to the thread linked to above.
Best regards
Kevin (StuffedCat)
