Smugsearch issue

forevermemorable

Okay, I have tried for about 5 hours to get the pricing down on my gallery pictures and it just doesn't plain work! There is an error in Smug Mug's web site! I have created a price for my portfolio and I have applied this pricing to all of my galleries. If I go into any gallery and click on the tools option for "Set pricing" I get the pricing amounts I have set up...so far so good...right? However, if I pertain to be a customer and place an order in for a print, I get Smug Mug's default pricing, which is NOT what I want. I have tried every angle and every option known to man. No matter how many times I try to get this to work, every time I go to place an order, I get your stupid default prices (i.e. 4x6 print at 21 cents). It is impossible to fix this. I have set up a portfolio pricing and all the settings are correct!

I really need this pricing to work for my customers!

Site name: photobyjeanne.com

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SherwinJames

Problem with SMUGMUG search
Site Name: www.ofmemories.com
Problem statement:
I have added a smugmug search box in my header. On my home page, when I search for keyword "wedding" (not logged in), the search results return "wedding" keyword (correct), a single gallery (correct), NO photos (INCORRECT). The photos have both a keyword "wedding", as well as Wedding as the caption.
Link to site: http://www.ofmemories.com
System: Windows 7
Browser: Any browser will do, but I have used Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera (all latest versions) with same result.

I have spent countless hours with the help desk, to no avail. Please help, or I am forced to remove the search box. There is also another issue with results including galleries from other users (but I'll save that for another post).

Thank You.

Lindy

Hey Sherwin,

I'm one of the SmugMug Support Heroes. Those were my screen grabs we sent to you, in our recent reply.

We're going to do some deeper digging, to see what is causing those issues. We appreciate your patience with us, and hope to have a solid answer for you, soon.

Lindy

jfriend

Lindy wrote: »

Hey Sherwin,

I'm one of the SmugMug Support Heroes. Those were my screen grabs we sent to you, in our recent reply.

We're going to do some deeper digging, to see what is causing those issues. We appreciate your patience with us, and hope to have a solid answer for you, soon.

Lindy

Lindy, do you mind changing your dgrin tag (what currently says "big grins") so we can know that you're a Smugmug hero?

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

Site Name: www.ofmemories.com
Problem statement:
I have added a smugmug search box in my header. On my home page, when I search for keyword "wedding" (not logged in), the search results return "wedding" keyword (correct), a single gallery (correct), NO photos (INCORRECT). The photos have both a keyword "wedding", as well as Wedding as the caption.
Link to site: http://www.ofmemories.com
System: Windows 7
Browser: Any browser will do, but I have used Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera (all latest versions) with same result.

I have spent countless hours with the help desk, to no avail. Please help, or I am forced to remove the search box. There is also another issue with results including galleries from other users (but I'll save that for another post).

Thank You.

Sherwin,

I think the reason for some of the confusion here is that there are multiple things going on. So let me try and break through some of that.

First, you did find a bug with the erratic behavior, which if I've fixed the right thing, is sometimes when doing a search you would have other user's galleries show up. The reason for this happening is that for performance we cache search results and it was pulling up searches in a "global" context for your site. This obviously would be very confusing for folks trying to reproduce the issue you are having because the data is only cached for a period of time. In any event, I have fixed that and it will go live the next time we push our code out.

As for the photos not showing up, we're looking at that - there seems to be a regression in our last code push, so it is not just your site that is affected on this one. I'll post back here when the issue has been found and fixed.

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

Sherwin,

I think the reason for some of the confusion here is that there are multiple things going on. So let me try and break through some of that.

First, you did find a bug with the erratic behavior, which if I've fixed the right thing, is sometimes when doing a search you would have other user's galleries show up. The reason for this happening is that for performance we cache search results and it was pulling up searches in a "global" context for your site. This obviously would be very confusing for folks trying to reproduce the issue you are having because the data is only cached for a period of time. In any event, I have fixed that and it will go live the next time we push our code out.

As for the photos not showing up, we're looking at that - there seems to be a regression in our last code push, so it is not just your site that is affected on this one. I'll post back here when the issue has been found and fixed.

- Greg

Greg,

Thanks for the follow-up. At least now I know it is not "user-error". When do you think the next code push will take place? I'll keep a lookout for the second fix as well.

Thanks again for the follow-up!

Sherwin

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

Greg,

Thanks for the follow-up. At least now I know it is not "user-error". When do you think the next code push will take place? I'll keep a lookout for the second fix as well.

Thanks again for the follow-up!

Sherwin

It will definitely go out on Thursday, but I imagine we'll need to push something out sooner for the photos not showing up. If so, it will go out when that happens.

Definitely not user error, but I can understand why everyone was getting confused about this because of how random it was.

- Greg

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

Greg,

Thanks for the follow-up. At least now I know it is not "user-error". When do you think the next code push will take place? I'll keep a lookout for the second fix as well.

Thanks again for the follow-up!

Sherwin

Sherwin,

I got some more information about what is going on with searches like "wedding". When searches are executed against the full-text index where there are a very large (many millions) of documents for that keyword, MySQL has some features (err bugs) that are supposed to prevent memory/performance-related problems. This is something which, apparently, the MySQL developers changed in recent versions of their database server. Their solution to the situation was to not return any results.

This one is going to be painful, but we are aware of it and are trying to find a workable solution to it. Thankfully it really only affects a handful of search words. Even words like "black" should work okay for you, just to give you an idea of how big the result set would have to be for this to happen. Unfortunately, "wedding" is one of those words

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

Sherwin,

I got some more information about what is going on with searches like "wedding". When searches are executed against the full-text index where there are a very large (many millions) of documents for that keyword, MySQL has some features (err bugs) that are supposed to prevent memory/performance-related problems. This is something which, apparently, the MySQL developers changed in recent versions of their database server. Their solution to the situation was to not return any results.

This one is going to be painful, but we are aware of it and are trying to find a workable solution to it. Thankfully it really only affects a handful of search words. Even words like "black" should work okay for you, just to give you an idea of how big the result set would have to be for this to happen. Unfortunately, "wedding" is one of those words

- Greg

Greg,

Unfortunate for me indeed. Since one of the main things I am trying to promote for my business is wedding photography. But I do understand the issue. I am just surprised that this has not surfaced before, seeing that there are so many wedding photographers at Smugmug.

From your description, it does not sound as though there is much I can do on my side to work around this. But maybe I could change/add keyword such as "wedding-photo" to the appropriate photos, and with some custom javascript, I would somehow change "wedding" to "wedding-photo" after user submits search request. What do you think of that as an interim work-around?

Allen

SherwinJames wrote: »

Greg,

Unfortunate for me indeed. Since one of the main things I am trying to promote for my business is wedding photography. But I do understand the issue. I am just surprised that this has not surfaced before, seeing that there are so many wedding photographers at Smugmug.

From your description, it does not sound as though there is much I can do on my side to work around this. But maybe I could change/add keyword such as "wedding-photo" to the appropriate photos, and with some custom javascript, I would somehow change "wedding" to "wedding-photo" after user submits search request. What do you think of that as an interim work-around?

You can change in bulk all the "Wedding" keywords. Go to the keyword page.
http://www.ofmemories.com/keyword/wedding
Tools > edit caption/keywords

SherwinJames

Allen wrote: »

You can change in bulk all the "Wedding" keywords. Go to the keyword page.
http://www.ofmemories.com/keyword/wedding
Tools > edit caption/keywords

Allen,

Thanks. I am good with that part. I was mainly asking about whether the javascript part (and the whole solution for that matter) made sense as an interim work-around.

Sherwin

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

Greg,

Unfortunate for me indeed. Since one of the main things I am trying to promote for my business is wedding photography. But I do understand the issue. I am just surprised that this has not surfaced before, seeing that there are so many wedding photographers at Smugmug.

I think the reason this was not noticed is that it was silently slipped into the MySQL code and (to me at least) goes against the grain of an expected change. Since i know you are an IT guy and I can geek out for a second: this is not the 50% rule in MySQL full-text search. Its something more subtle. You can see a discussion of it here: http://serverfault.com/questions/243452/why-is-this-mysql-fulltext-query-returning-0-rows-when-matching-rows-are-present

..<s~~igh>..

At least we can fix the inconsistency issue (as I mentioned before that will go out on our next code release). Your photos will still get indexed by Google because of the keywords and as you've seen on the search results page we handle keywords separately from full-text search. So you will see the keyword results as you do now, just not the photo results.. That is why I'd leave "wedding" in there. You will still get search results from the keywords - its just the ad-hoc searching that is affected (when I say "just" - certainly don't mean to minimize this in any way. I'm personally very disappointed in MySQL over how they've implemented this).

That does sound like a decent work-a-round for now, if it works for you. I'd still leave "wedding" in there though, because it will help very much with SEO and your promotional efforts.

SherwinJames wrote: »

Allen,

Thanks. I am good with that part. I was mainly asking about whether the javascript part (and the whole solution for that matter) made sense as an interim work-around.

Sherwin

I'm not sure I understand the JS part though, can you elaborate on what implications you think might be there? Sorry if you already explained this somewhere else, just scratching my head a bit on this.

Ed: Ahh, I get it now. That definitely sounds like an interesting work-a-round and actually rather creative. I'd still leave "wedding" in there though for the reasons I previously mentioned. A caveat is that when adding the keyword "wedding-photo", it will automatically remove the "-" and it to "weddingphoto". I'm not sure if that would cause a problem for what you are hoping to accomplish, but wanted to mention it. Consequently if you do a search for "wedding-photo", it will do the same normalization.

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

I think the reason this was not noticed is that it was silently slipped into the MySQL code and (to me at least) goes against the grain of an expected change. Since i know you are an IT guy and I can geek out for a second: this is not the 50% rule in MySQL full-text search. Its something more subtle. You can see a discussion of it here: http://serverfault.com/questions/243452/why-is-this-mysql-fulltext-query-returning-0-rows-when-matching-rows-are-present

..<s~~igh>..

At least we can fix the inconsistency issue (as I mentioned before that will go out on our next code release). Your photos will still get indexed by Google because of the keywords and as you've seen on the search results page we handle keywords separately from full-text search. So you will see the keyword results as you do now, just not the photo results.. That is why I'd leave "wedding" in there. You will still get search results from the keywords - its just the ad-hoc searching that is affected (when I say "just" - certainly don't mean to minimize this in any way. I'm personally very disappointed in MySQL over how they've implemented this).

That does sound like a decent work-a-round for now, if it works for you. I'd still leave "wedding" in there though, because it will help very much with SEO and your promotional efforts.



I'm not sure I understand the JS part though, can you elaborate on what implications you think might be there? Sorry if you already explained this somewhere else, just scratching my head a bit on this.

Ed: Ahh, I get it now. That definitely sounds like an interesting work-a-round and actually rather creative. I'd still leave "wedding" in there though for the reasons I previously mentioned. A caveat is that when adding the keyword "wedding-photo", it will automatically remove the "-" and it to "weddingphoto". I'm not sure if that would cause a problem for what you are hoping to accomplish, but wanted to mention it. Consequently if you do a search for "wedding-photo", it will do the same normalization.

- Greg

What if I use keywords "wedding" and "wedding photo" on my photos, then do a JS search request replace on submit ("wedding" --> "wedding photo")? I am actually doing a quick-n-dirty version of this right now, and it is returning the results that I want. Do you see any issues, performance or otherwise, with that. I just need to do a better JS implementation. I am currently replacing "wedding" on entry AND submit to the search box, instead of just submit.

Sherwin

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

What if I use keywords "wedding" and "wedding photo" on my photos, then do a JS search request replace on submit ("wedding" --> "wedding photo")? I am actually doing a quick-n-dirty version of this right now, and it is returning the results that I want. Do you see any issues, performance or otherwise, with that. I just need to do a better JS implementation. I am currently replacing "wedding" on entry AND submit to the search box, instead of just submit.

Sherwin

That should be fine with that. But when you enter the keywords put "" around them ("wedding photo"), otherwise they will end up as separate keywords. I don't see anything that would induce an additional performance penalty for this.

I just did a quick test to verify it - you may want to double-check to make sure. If you go to http://gregsaylor.smugmug.com and search for "halloween" you will see 4 photos come up, 1 tagged with "halloween" and three that I tagged with "halloween 2007". If you then search for "halloween 2007" (without the quotes), there are 3 images that come up (actually at the moment there are 4, one of them is a photo I deleted that is still pending, but I'm sure you can see that the one from "halloween" is not coming up).

So, if I understand what you are trying to do well enough that should be a good test to validate that it will work.

When you say you are replacing it on entry, you mean when the user types "wedding" you are replacing it as-they-type? If so, personally, I would try to avoid that if at all possible. To me it may create a confusing user experience.

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

That should be fine with that. But when you enter the keywords put "" around them ("wedding photo"), otherwise they will end up as separate keywords. I don't see anything that would induce an additional performance penalty for this.

I just did a quick test to verify it - you may want to double-check to make sure. If you go to http://gregsaylor.smugmug.com and search for "halloween" you will see 4 photos come up, 1 tagged with "halloween" and three that I tagged with "halloween 2007". If you then search for "halloween 2007" (without the quotes), there are 3 images that come up (actually at the moment there are 4, one of them is a photo I deleted that is still pending, but I'm sure you can see that the one from "halloween" is not coming up).

So, if I understand what you are trying to do well enough that should be a good test to validate that it will work.

When you say you are replacing it on entry, you mean when the user types "wedding" you are replacing it as-they-type? If so, personally, I would try to avoid that if at all possible. To me it may create a confusing user experience.

- Greg

Greg,

I understand what you are saying regarding the quotes, but the results don't seem to agree with that. I have a set of 13 photos with keywords (wedding, wedding photo). When I do a search for "wedding photo", none of them are returned; when I do a search for wedding photo all thirteen are returned; when I do a search for wedding (have to submit search url [http://www.ofmemories.com/search/?searchWords=wedding&searchType=InUser&NickName=ofmemories&x=0&y=0] since my JS hack in is place), none of them are returned. You can see this behavior at www.ofmemories.com on the home page search. You can see the keywords at www.ofmemories.com/keyword

I must say, that I am a little confused as to what is expected behavior and what is the result of error/malfunction. But it seems as though what I have now is producing the results I want - need to do a little more testing though.

By the way, I am not replacing as they type. I had replace the smugmug checkInput() js with my own; but now I replace the onsubmit handler with my own, which does the replace and calls the smugmug checkInput().

Sherwin

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

Greg,

I understand what you are saying regarding the quotes, but the results don't seem to agree with that. I have a set of 13 photos with keywords (wedding, wedding photo). When I do a search for "wedding photo", none of them are returned; when I do a search for wedding photo all thirteen are returned; when I do a search for wedding (have to submit search url [http://www.ofmemories.com/search/?searchWords=wedding&searchType=InUser&NickName=ofmemories&x=0&y=0] since my JS hack in is place), none of them are returned. You can see this behavior at www.ofmemories.com on the home page search. You can see the keywords at www.ofmemories.com/keyword

I must say, that I am a little confused as to what is expected behavior and what is the result of error/malfunction. But it seems as though what I have now is producing the results I want - need to do a little more testing though.

By the way, I am not replacing as they type. I had replace the smugmug checkInput() js with my own; but now I replace the onsubmit handler with my own, which does the replace and calls the smugmug checkInput().

Sherwin

I probably misspoke a bit or wasn't very clear (5am, *lol*). What I meant to say is when entering the keywords for the photos, include the quotes. But, when doing a search omit them. I think that is what you are doing that is giving you the results though.

I looked at your JS work and it looks like a good work-around to me too.

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

I probably misspoke a bit or wasn't very clear (5am, *lol*). What I meant to say is when entering the keywords for the photos, include the quotes. But, when doing a search omit them. I think that is what you are doing that is giving you the results though.

I looked at your JS work and it looks like a good work-around to me too.

- Greg

You are most likely correct.

Let me know when you guys decide long term approach for this situation.

Thanks for your assistance.

Sherwin

Twoofy

Hi Sherwin,

The code fix for the inconsistent results has gone out. Let me know if you see any problems in that respect, but should be fixed.

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

Hi Sherwin,

The code fix for the inconsistent results has gone out. Let me know if you see any problems in that respect, but should be fixed.

- Greg

Have you guys given any thought to the long term solution for the search overflow problem? Currently, searches on my site take quite a bit of time, particularly for searches like "wedding photo".

Sherwin

Twoofy

SherwinJames wrote: »

Have you guys given any thought to the long term solution for the search overflow problem? Currently, searches on my site take quite a bit of time, particularly for searches like "wedding photo".

Sherwin

Yeah, its going to take a while though I'll definitely update you when its in testing, this is something that Don needs to get involved in and his time is in very short supply..

- Greg

SherwinJames

Twoofy wrote: »

Yeah, its going to take a while though I'll definitely update you when its in testing, this is something that Don needs to get involved in and his time is in very short supply..

- Greg

Ok. Thanks.