Don’t understand how matches are made

[clubside]

Howdy!

Though I’d yet to roll it out live I was a big fan of AJAX Search Pro which I’d bought so I picked up Related Comments which seemed a better fit, especially since the plugin I was using, YARPP, has been discontinued lol

I am developing a new theme for my friend and placed RCP on the site but the results with the default settings are baffling. Obvious related posts that show up with YARPP aren’t to be found, and what gets picked has no obvious correlation. This is an excellent example:

http://clubsidedev.com/2007/08/01/commando/

Despite plenty of Arnold-tagged posts not a one is in the RCP list. I’ve looked through the docs and beyond the confusing nature of the connected arrows section, the other related posts plugins I’ve tested worked “out of the box” like YARPP.

I guess I’m looking for some hand-holding to get the confidence to drop YARPP and go from there.

Thanks!
Chris

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi Chris,

By default, the plugin parses the title, content and excerpt fields and creates a keyword list for the keywords with the most occurences within these fields. Then it constructs a query against other posts to see if they match these keywords.

I suggest trying to enable this option here: https://i.imgur.com/3CHB7mV.png
This will increase the relevance of posts with the same tags as the current one to appear within the related posts list.

[clubside]

Hey Ernest,

Thanks for the quick reply!

I tried that option and indeed it does a much better job. I was just worried about the word “only”. My friend has reviewed thousands of movies but he’s a non-techie and while over time he’s gotten better with tags, I know there are hundreds with just one or two and was worried that the “only” wording would match few if any other posts.

I know there is the “fill with other stuff” option when there aren’t enough matches, does this fallback include matching by title and/or text like the default settings?

Thanks,
Chris

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi Chirs,

No, the fallback method gets either random, following or custom contents, but those does not respect those rules anymore. That is, because most of the time these rules did not yield enough results.
You can however define custom items for each individual post on the post editor screen, if you feel that the results are not relevant enough.

[clubside]

Hey Ernest,

Thanks again for the quick reply, I’ll ask one final thing and then leave you alone lol

Your plugin is the only Related Posts plugin of the 5 I played with that does not show matches on the Post edit screen. Your advice of setting manual related posts would make sense if that were true of Related Posts Pro, as it stands now I’d have to have two windows open to see what’s going on. Plus I could create the cached versions right then.

Final food for thought: allowing a Title/etc. fallback for tag matching makes a lot of sense. For “The Terminator” I’d like the Arnold matches, but also like matching “The Exterminator” and other titles with “terminator”. If tag matching were moved to to the primary match setting page and priority page it would seem to cover all the standard bases.

Thanks,
Chris

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately title/content matches during the fill process are not possible without completely re-writing that code section. I checked if there is any modification I could suggest, perhaps replacing a file, changing a few lines here and there, but it is a bit more complicated than that in terms of coding. Showing the post matches on the editor screen would be even more difficult than that, as it needs a complete implementation from the bottom to the top. I have noted these as feature requests, and will try to include them in an upcoming release.

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