Mad Props!

Just made a few changes to the code that splits your search text into individual words so that it can search. I've added a forward-slash as a word delimiter, because searching for "Rune/Silver Surfer" wasn't finding any "Rune" titles, and I thought it should. It definitely wouldn't have listed "Rune / Silver Surfer" as the first match, because it would have been searching for "Rune/Silver" as one word.

Right now I have these characters as word-delimiters:

• space
• comma
• hyphen
• colon
• slash

If you think of any other punctuation that should split words, let me know.

I'm also not bothering to search for any of these words, ever:

• an
• the
• of
• and
• & (ampersand)

Again, if you think there are words that it's not worth ever searching on, let me know. I hope there's not an official comic for the band "The The", because Comicster will never find it.

Something else I'm considering, and would like your feedback on:

If your search includes a single letter (eg. "Y: The Last Man" or "Universe X") then right now that single letter will be matched anywhere in a title. That means that any title containing "Y" or "X" (to use these examples) would be matched. That's a lot of titles.

What I'm thinking is this: If it's a single character we're trying to match, then just look for titles that begin with that single letter.

So searching for "Y: The Last Man" would find anything with "last" and "man" anywhere in the title, and also anything that begins with "y".

What do you guys think? It'll trim down the search results a fair bit, but for the better, I think. I mean - if you search for "a" then you're asking for a lot of titles/characters/creators/etc. Would it be nicer if searching for a single letter just got you stuff that starts with that letter?

For now I have implemented a simple idea to restrict potentially-enormous searches.

When you search for characters, creators and titles, you only get the first 100 results.

That way searching for "a" won't try to download thousands of items.

Hope that's ok with everyone.

I like your idea about limiting searches, but on another note searching for creators has been pretty frustrating for me. 99% of the creators online (at least my collection) have first - last name format, others (not many) are last, first name. If I'm searching for say "Mark Bagley". It won't find "Bagley" if I type that in the search, i'm forced to type "Mark" then all the possible "Marks" are listed. Any way to search both first and last name? Just a thought for those many that have different formats.

Eh? I can find "Mark Bagley" whether I search for "Bagley", "Mark Bagley" or even "Bagley, Mark".

Sorry Mabs, I should have been more specific. I'm at work so I can't give it another go, but I believe it's only when I try to "add a crew member" to my issue (comicster skin), not general searching.

Ah, I'm with you. I got confused coz we're kind of off-topic with this.

Yeah, finding a character when entering a cast-member is just a straight name lookup, not a search. I think making it a search would complicate the interface a bit too much.

I see where you're coming from with surname vs given name coming first though. We've had many suggestions here on the forums about that, but most involve splitting the 'name' field into two parts, which I don't wanna do coz I like the simplicity of a single field.

Something I do periodically is browse through my creators and check for names that aren't in "Surname, Given Names" format, and fix 'em up. Might be worth doing the same, particularly if you've just downloaded the crew of an issue and it has added new creators to your collection.

In the meantime, I still want to make a link to the online submission guidelines from within Comicster so people know that we prefer "Surname, Given Names" as the creator name format. (I still need to finish that document.)