A touchstone failure

In is represented by three copies on LibraryThing but doesn't show up as a touchstone option.

Robert

The work search seems to be ordered by a combination of matching the search terms and number of copies. The few copies and ubiquity of the word "in" probably put the book too far down the list to appear in the touchstone options.

However, you can get a working touchstone by including the author name, e.g.: In (Andrew Waterhouse).

The bug has a workaround, then. I used to use the work number workaround, but it would be so nice if it just worked.

Robert

The number workaround is no longer supported. :(

The problem with "IN" is that it's a stop word - it isn't indexed. Thus, it won't show up as a touchstone, because the search doesn't know it's there, and can't search for it (unless there's a trick to include stop words in the search, but i was under the impression that there isn't). I think "In (Andrew Waterhouse)" works because it's searching for "Andrew Waterhouse" and currently there's only the 2 works by him, but maybe I'm missing something.

I just wish the number thing were still supported. Perhaps this thread should be linked to that RSI thread.

4> I believe that stop words *are* now indexed. They weren't before and if I remember correctly it was messing up exact title matches so they stopped excluding them.

I could've sworn that there was a complaint just the other day that was solved when it was realized that the stop words were causing problems. Touchstones don't use exact title matches, though, do they?

Perhaps the problem is the number of characters?

Even ones that worked yesterday aren't working the next time I come in. I really miss the work numbers. Touchstones stayed touchstones with that.

Touchstones stayed touchstones with that.

Touchstones are not recalculated now. Whatever they were set to when you save the message they are set to again when you edit it.

Why then does it take such a long time for them to come up each time I edit my list for the year?

I would really like being able to force a touchstone with the work number back. It was so simple and so reliable, there shouldn't be any fuss with touchstones any more.

Robert

http://www.librarything.com/topic/96717#2361115

I just fixed Looking Glass Wars a day or two ago. Now it's gone again.

I suppose I should add that in this case, I know that it has been combined since, as setting the touchstone showed other works (no author) and I asked to have them combined. http://www.librarything.com/topic/122451#2899613

>10 MarthaJeanne:

It's not working because it links to an expired (aliased) work number. Having people manually add work numbers doesn't solve that problem. It actually makes it worse!

I'll look at having it pass through to the new work number.

I'm also finding that touchstones take a long time to load when I edit messages; I usually end up leaving the tab and doing something else for a while.

Touchstones are not recalculated now. Whatever they were set to when you save the message they are set to again when you edit it.

The problem here is when we try to copy the touchstones over to a new thread, which happens very frequently. Previously we could just go into edit mode and copy them all, and they'd stay pointing to the correct work. Now we have to redo them all with every new thread. Very irritating.

I am having a touchstone problem of long standing:

William J. Cunningham goes to a list of choices. When I click on others, it gives me the choice for him which I click on. The result is Randy Horton??? Very strange.

Edited to add: a normal author search brings up the correct author record.

Reviewing. The issue reported in >1 Mr.Durick: is still live (the work titled "In" does not come up as an option on the touchstones list) and the workaround mentioned in >2 eromsted: still works.
I cannot repro the issue mentioned in >13 fdholt:: William J. Cunningham comes up as an option, and seems to be linked to the correct author, or at least to another author of that name.

My inclination is to defer this due to the low incidence of the issue and likely difficulty of a fix, or else to close it outright as "won't fix".

Test touchstones: out but

I've never understood why Tim won't just boost exact title matches in the search results. If someone types in the exact title, and it's in the index then it should appear at the top.

>15 jjwilson61: I actually find that exact matches are often favoured too much, especially when there's a subtitle involved. When I touchstone Blink, I'm much more likely to want the 14,000-member Gladwell book (which just barely makes it into the top 10 search results) than the 500-member Dekker book, even if LibraryThing thinks the former is actually called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

In is there at number 6 and 7.

There is no magic exact-title matching in the search engine, unfortunately. "In" is tough insofar as it's almost as common as "The." That a book with only a few copies comes up as 6 and 7 when a hundred thousand books that have the word and have more copies could be above it, is good enough for now.