MyBB Ideas

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Search terms in search url

Voting Closed
12 votes

Submitted by the andyman, 24th March 2007, 12:56:44 PM

At the moment I believe that search.php gets its information using POST. I think it would be better to either change it to or allow it to use GET as well to get the search terms from the URL (e.g. search.php?terms=foo+something). Not only would this allow search results to be linked to but it would also mean that forum owners could make valid Open Search xml files that work properly in IE7 and use MyBB's search function (by using http://forum-url.com/?q={searchTerms}) instead of having to mess around with the xml and add things like parameters:method="POST" which, although do work in FF, IE doesn't like. I'm sure there would be other benefits to changing (or modifying) it as well.

3 Comments

  1. When you get the search results, the URL does have an "sid" which you can give to other people...although it's not really a "friendly" URL.

    DennisTT, 24th March 2007, 7:41:57 PM

  2. At present the sid is just a random string that has been hashed. Why not do that silently, and use the search terms to build the string?

    e.g.

    request for:
    search.php?terms=foo+something

    MyBB sees:
    search.php?sid=a979dd5ff65a7a8e105e157fed28ad2a (md5 of foo+something)

    sunspark, 25th March 2007, 3:36:37 AM

  3. For security purposes.

    Search results are cached to speed up the search process significantly. In order to cache them we need to assign them some sort of identifier to pull the cached results. Using an id ?sid=1 sid=2 etc doesn't work because people can change the ID and pull up search results they shouldn't be.

    You may be wondering why this matters and why we don't cache based on the search term? (but use a random string instead) Permissions. Our cached results take in to account permissions for both forums and groups applied on your forums so we're not always looping over and over again to recheck the permissions for search results.

    Chris Boulton, 28th March 2007, 1:00:28 AM