<Search> to highlight specific comments?

In January 2018 I raised a query by email with James @gdpelican . . .

homes-in only at the thread level. The specific comment that contains the text string isn’t revealed. Using the browser’s function doesn’t do the trick. Firefox seems able to find the string within the comment on a thread-page. But it finds it even when the string isn’t visible (because a comment has been collapsed), which is confusing. With multiple collapsed comments on a thread-page, there’s no way of knowing which comment is the one. Safari’s can’t find the string at all, visible or not - it seems not to ‘see’ comments.

James' response . . .

We used to have this feature, but it slowed down the search a bit and we never got any feedback that anyone was using the thing . . . takes a bit of time that we didn't want to sacrifice for an operation that people expect to be lightning fast (google has spoiled us all, heh) . . . I think the path of least resistance here is to introduce an in-thread search (similar to what we've recently done on the group page), where you can find the thread you're interested in, then search in it for the term you're interested in from there.

And my comment . . .

Sounds good to me James. Thanks. Capable of identifying multiple hits in multiple comments? Displaying a hit count. And a step-through-the-hits button?

I've run across this need once or twice, and I would prefer an option to expand all comments to be able to search in page with my browser, or an enhanced search bar with a search results page displaying extracts of the comment containing the keyword. An additional search input for in-page would seem confusing to me...

In this comment I've given an instance of within-thread search being needed. When threads get complex and long, with many collapsed sections ('Load n responses'), it's hard to find what x said about y topic. I'm finding this a frequent need in some busy threads. Is this on the roadmap @gdpelican ?

At the same time, it would help to be able to display a thread with only some sub-threads expanded, to avoid lengthy scrolling?

Is this on the roadmap @gdpelican ?

Bug fix needed In that same comment I noted that when responding by email to a notification email . .

emailed response will appear as a response to the main thread, unhelpfully not connected with the specific comment

@gdpelican I think this is a bug not a missing feature?

PS I did eventually find the comment, via the notification email. But I had to use the link in the header (Strypey commented in . . .) not the 'View it in Loomio' link in the footer. A further bug?

PPS Something odd going on here . . When I tried this route again (from the header link) it didn't find the correct comment as it did on a previous occasion. And indeed, the link in the header is the same as the link in the footer! Strypey's comment was in fact the most recent but - bcos I always view a thread 'Nested' - was lurking one level down, in a sub-thread that had started ages ago. OK, a piece of learning there - sometimes view 'Chronological' not 'Nested'. However, the email response-to-thread bug remains.

@mike_hales - it's been 5 years. I wonder if you have any time for Loomio these days.

I'm just writing to let you know I've finally upgraded the search so you can search within threads.

If you want to share feedback about it. It's welcome.

thanks rob for this work and this contact :) I’m just a passing user these days (in social.coop). my community these past 3or4 years has been Discourse users. Lacks the voting sophistication but works well in other ways, including cross posting between topics, and tagging - somewhat more wiki-ish in nature.