Internet Search Confusion

[DaveXVI]

I'm subscribed to the search service. Sometimes I enter a search for an old movie, and nothing is found, and a box pops up saying "No Results Searching On Subject 'Old Movie'". OK.

But sometimes I enter a search for something new that should be found, and my hard drive sounds like it's receiving something, and the box saying "No Results" doesn't appear, but no results are shown. Note that it does return results for some searches, so it's not a network problem.

I dimly remember this happening a year or two ago when I was searching for NZBs, and it turned out I had my size filter set too high, so I set that to zero, and things were OK again. I rechecked all my filters today, and they seem to all be set to allow everything. I even turned off my spam filters. But I still get no results, even though I don't get the "No Results" message box. And yet some of these posts show up on binsearch.info.

What am I doing wrong?

[Quade]

1 - Make sure the search tab is set for "Internet"

2 - Make sure you don't have any filters set that filter out the results of the search. Like size or age filters.

Do you use the filter profiles and is anything set in Global filters?

[DaveXVI]

Newsbin is a great program, and you give great support. Please accept the below as constructive criticism.

I had all the dropdown boxes in the main window set to Internet, All Groups, None, etc. I cleared out the filters from the Filters Window as best I could. But those are kind of confusing -- you have a setting for Max size = none, which sounds like what I want, but when I set that, it reverts to zero after I close it. Zero is non-intuitive for a Max when you have 'None' available, and I don't see why None doesn't stick. Same with the "Accept If" setting in the category filters; seems like I want "Disable" to accept everything, but I'm not sure, maybe "Disable" means accept nothing in that category, but either way, when I set it, it reverts back to "Accept If" with a list of default extensions. Why have settings that make it confusing as to which one means don't restrict anything, especially when your program changes one to the other without telling you? And why not have an "Accept Everything" setting, instead of forcing the user to update an obscure setting when a new extension comes out (at least that's what it looks like)? I'm sure it seems perfectly clear to you when you're coding it, but just look at the news if you think everybody thinks the same way.

Finally out of desperation, I deleted all the rejected posters in the Poster Settings, and that seems to have fixed it. I don't even remember putting anything in there, but I've been using this program for 15 years so maybe I did, and maybe a new poster happens to have the same name as an old spammer.

I suggest that when you return no results because of whatever filter, you pop up a messagebox and say that, instead of just no results, and no indication why.

[Quade]

Finally out of desperation, I deleted all the rejected posters in the Poster Settings, and that seems to have fixed it. I don't even remember putting anything in there, but I've been using this program for 15 years so maybe I did, and maybe a new poster happens to have the same name as an old spammer.

I have an action item to make it possible to display the total and filtered count to make this more obvious. So, in this case you'd see "N/M" or something like that indicating total and filtered size. That would make this more obvious.