Feature - Implemented Allow mall searches for unknown items

[lostcalpolydude]

If you tell mafia to do a mall search for a string that it can't recognize as an item, it will not perform the mall search. Searching for a term that will identify unknown items (new content) requires finding a substring that matches two already known items to have it sent unaltered.

There's the claim that it saves server hits, but the suggested workaround was to search for "a" and "e" and "o" in them to identify all new items, and even doing that only once a month or so probably negates the benefit of blocking incorrect searches (typos and such).

Edit: Discussion started here.

 

[Fred Nefler]

I would like this. Searching the mall for "frosty" after the IotM release led mafia to change it to "frosty's frosty mug", so it didn't list the frosty halo (and thus learn about it). I like getting mafia to learn about new items through mall searching, since it saves me the trouble of getting itemids and descids manually, making it easier to add them to the wiki. But when mafia alters my search to the point it won't see the new items, it's kind of a bummer.

I'd never thought of just doing vowel searches. Not terribly intuitive.

 

[roippi]

There's the claim that it saves server hits, but the suggested workaround was to search for "a" and "e" and "o" in them to identify all new items, and even doing that only once a month or so probably negates the benefit of blocking incorrect searches (typos and such).

It's (I dunno, approximately) equivalent to the database, but you're still saving the webserver lots of hits. I prefer the current behavior. The velocity of changes to mafia is fast enough that I don't think this is justified.

 

[lostcalpolydude]

I think the main reason I noticed it is that you used to be able to search for arbitrary strings and mafia would perform the mall search. That doesn't necessarily mean the old way was better, but I don't think it was intentionally changed away from that.

 

[Winterbay]

Doing arbitrary searches is not so much a problem for me, what bothers me is that I could put in a completely valid item name and get nothing in return. The real problem there is that there is no way to distinguish between a search for a real item and a random string (or a misspelled string).

The fact that we still do point-releases (even though I know that we are seemingly trying to wean people off of those) where it could be months between updates leads me to believe that a person that only uses point-releases will have a much more enjoyable experience if he could easily search for new items and get overrides generated than have to do a search for "e", "a" or "o" just to find the new stuff and generate overrides for them.

 

[Theraze]

Regarding those people, if they want it, they can either purchase the item after finding it with overrides once and then it will generate the overrides when they log in and will be able to continue purchasing them using the current behaviour, or they can use the relay browser to find the objects... right?

 

[fronobulax]

Since I made a comment about server hits let me stand by my claim that not searching for something mafia believes is not there saves hits compared to searching for something mafia believes is not there.

Why is it of benefit to a user who is not engaged in spading or discovery to search for mallable items that are otherwise unknown to mafia? The only reason that I can see is because the user knows about the item from some non-mafia source and wants to purchase it. That functionality currently exists so long as the user uses the relay browser and not mafia's purchase tab. If the user does that then the item will be in inventory but it will still take some action (such as refreshing the inventory) before mafia knows about the item and even then, if the item is consumed or otherwise disposed of, mafia will have to relearn of its existence.

So the (only) "normal" user who benefits is someone who sticks to point releases, knows about a new item and the item is consumed or otherwise used on a daily basis so that it is constantly being forgotten and relearned. If this is not changed then the user either has to use the relay browser or has to learn a sub-string that the new item has in common with existing items so that a search from Purchases will discover it.

A previous solution, data override files, seems to have caused problems that were worse than the ones the overrides solved.

The problem only exists from the time KoL releases a new item until the time that the user adopts a point release that knows about the item.

I guess the bottom line for me is that I don't think this is a particularly huge issue that has to be solved in code. We know when it might occur, we have work-arounds we can tell people to use when it happens and we can make the problem go away as soon as people adopt a more recent daily build.

I do believe the feature is beneficial to spades and the kind of people who are going to going to do vowel searches anyway, so what underlies my opinion is the question of which particular subset of the user community should be catered to?

 

[Fred Nefler]

Regarding those people, if they want it, they can either purchase the item after finding it with overrides once and then it will generate the overrides when they log in and will be able to continue purchasing them using the current behaviour, or they can use the relay browser to find the objects... right?

Doing the search in the relay browser does not cause mafia to auto-add new items. And when content is new, you DO NOT want to buy them from the mall, since they're all at ludicrous prices.

 

[roippi]

Since I was recently digging around in this code, I'd note that mafia will allow any searches that are in quotes, even if it doesn't know about that item.

With that in mind, I think we should mark this rejected. Mafia should generate an override once that search is performed, which should then behave as expected.

The issue where overrides are not being generated for unknown items encountered in the relay browser sounds like a separate thing, which deserves its own bug report/feature request. If that issue still exists.

 

[Bale]

With that in mind, I think we should mark this rejected.

Actually, it should be marked implemented since KoLmafia already has the feature. Adding quotes around the item will tell mafia to search for the item even though it is unknown.

 

[roippi]

That works.

 

[Theraze]

Personally, visiting the Mr Store and looking at the RG this month created overrides for me, so guessing that was implemented at some point as well.

 

[Veracity]

Personally, visiting the Mr Store and looking at the RG this month created overrides for me, so guessing that was implemented at some point as well.

It's been that way for years. Literally.

r8066 | veracity0 | 2010-02-03 01:37:39 -0500 (Wed, 03 Feb 2010) | 5 lines

Simply visiting Mr. Store suffices to learn about new IOTMs

That has nothing to do with mall searches.

 

[Theraze]

Ah, sorry. I'd looked and seen the relay browser mentioned in post 8, checked the store... didn't mallsearch in relay. Don't know if that ever actually got implemented or if Fred actually made into a proper FReq.