Hello,

I am new to the forum. Every second time I try a search I get the following message:
"Sorry, you cannot run a new search so soon after your last search was run. Please try again shortly." This is a little annoying, above all if you've made a literal error and want to try again...

By the way: I try to use a avatar of 8.9 kb -> and I got a error message that the file is too big...

This has been asked and answer many times but since you're new here, we'll explain it once again. You can only do a search once every two minutes. We realize that sometimes this can be annoying especially if you just made a typo in the first search but a two minute time period is not really that long to wait. Each time you do a search, the engine goes through over 3 million posts. Restricting each member to a 2 minute wait time, helps control the overall search time for everyone.

As for your avatar, while the file size is acceptable, most likely the height and width of the photo is not. There is a description of what size is allowed right next to the avatar window in the edit profile section.

Not a good enough reason. It is a shame that having all this technological tools for quality in these days, specially for such a popular site like the magic Café, that they have such a poor search engine. It is very disappointing for users to have such a bad experience when searching this site. The Magic Café should have the resources to solve this problem. This low quality search engine has deter me many times from searching anything in this site. As a result, I frequent the site much, much less.

The same thing goes for the avatar, I'm very frustrated trying to upload an image in here. The Café should make it much easier for this. Again, they have the resources.

This restriction has been in place for a very long time and most members understand the reasoning. It is not a problem to be resolved. It may not be a good reason to you, but the search engine is there as a convenience for the members and not meant to solve everyone's problem. The two minute wait time is not excessive. If you do a search and get results, it should take up most of the two minutes for you to scan those results. Granted, if you do a typo originally, it is a little inconvenient to wait 2 minutes but that shouldn't happen often.

As for your avatar, we have 4875 members that have uploaded avatars using our current guidelines. I'm not sure how much easier you want it to be. We tell you the type of file and the size of the file necessary. If your picture complies with those regulations, you should have no problem. There are also many free sites out there that will take you photo, regardless of the size and automatically reduce it to our size restrictions. It's not difficult at all.

Dave,

By any chance do you have the names of some of those sites? I always have a problem with trying to re-size photos when I want to send attachments in emails or make avatars. Thanks!

Ok... Thanks for taking the time to reply

I guess in the long run, this issue should be a business decision if it needs upgrading or not.

I think, there is probably so much good information in The Magic Café.
It's just harder to find it with the current search engine.

Here's the site I used for my avatar. It's not the best avatar but part of the problem is the resolution from my camera but other than that, it's a real easy site to use and does a good job. Several members have used this site with good results.

http://www.shrinkpictures.com/create-avatar/

Thanks, It Helps

I was able to use photoshop to resize using "save for web" option under "file".

Also Irfanview http://www.irfanview.com/ is a great freeware product that will resize and reformat almost any image type, as well as the most basic “whole image” functions. It’s not PhotoShop, but for 99% of what most people need, it does the job.

For search, you can use Google for all but the private areas by simply adding “site:www.themagiccafe.com” after your search terms. For instance,

houdini site:www.themagiccafe.com

will get you all listings of Houdini in the public areas of just the Café. Google is refreshed several times a day, so the content is current, and their servers are HUGE, so there’s no need for a timeout.

:) (and we won’t have to see Dave answer the same question for the 52,603rd time)

If it ever came to a choice between speedy searches and losing access to the YEARS of archived knowledge here, I’d pick waiting a little while (and being careful with my typos!)

You can search freely using Google. Just go to Google and type site:themagiccafe.com and it will search the entire site as many times as you want without any time delays.