Nation Search

[Sedgistan]

The nation search was changed at some time so that if you don't get an exact match, only 10 nations are displayed. This is a bit of a nuisance, as there's no guarantee that the nation(s) that you are looking for is amongst those 10. Is it possible to have it changed, so it works like the region search - ie displays all matching results, if necessary over several pages?

[Evil Wolf]

I agree, and I've noticed that it used to be that partial entries used to give you pages of results, just like it still does when you enter partials into the regional field. This ended a few months ago, I think about the same time the Liberation Proposals came into effect, not that the two events are related, just thinking someone dabbled in the code while they were at it.

I enter "A" and press "find region" and I get 315 pages of results, from "0000000000 Anarchy" to "ZZZZ Technotopia". Excessive? Maybe, but if I were to narrow down the entry I narrow down the results. Given that there are far more nation in Nationstates than regions, shouldn't it be the same for the nation search since more numbers means its harder to find nations? Just a thought.

[Charlotte Ryberg]

To be honest I would not mind the nation search being like the region search because it is likely that there would be lots of nations with, something like "north" in their name or some with various shortened words such as "so" (forming part of words like "solar" or "south").

[Sedgistan]

Bump

[Sedgistan]

Bumped for [violet]'s attention.

[[violet]]

I'm a little reluctant to do this because it can hit performance. Currently, the game gets to stop examining nation names after 10 matches, so any given search might require only a few hundred or thousand names to be examined. To figure out how many results there are in total, the game needs to examine all 50,000 nation names every single time someone searches. Which is not terrible, but not something I want to encourage unless there's a good reason for it. Can you give me some examples of frustrations you've had with the current service?

[Sedgistan]

Well one example would be that I sometimes search 'sedg' to see if anyone has created a nation which imitates my name (it has happened - sedginistan is one). Since I happen to have quite a lot of puppets with that in their name, not all of them are displayed.

Other than that, its either looking for another nation of someone who uses a relatively common word/sequence of letters in their name, or searching for a nation of which I only remember part of its name.

If you don't want it searching all the nations, then a larger limit (20?) would be an improvement.