Search Issues - Sphinx Settings
I just spoke to Frank about this, and he'd rather Support not use the Sphinx settings in a site's console page in order to try to resolve search errors - specifically the function where we cycle which Sphinx server the site is using:
All this does is move the site away from the error, but doesn't actually do anything to resolve the issue - which Ops would like to be able to do.
Search is an important function, so there a couple scenarios where it's alright to skip protocol:
- A situation where it is a weekend, holiday or way after hours and might be a long while before a client's search issue is looked at (Ops is typically pretty good at checking search errors within an hour or so if it's reported around business hours)
- A situation where a client is super stressed/adamant about search working on their site ASAP (they just launched, they're in the middle of an event, etc)
In those cases, I think cycling the Sphinx server would be an okay move, but I would still file a ticket with as much debug information as you can, so the Support Devs or Ops can check into it.
The Template settings are still okay to touch.
If a client reports that they can't search their Knowledge base, and we notice in their settings that their template isn't set to check 'KNOWLEDGEARTICLE' than that is fine to toggle on.
On that same note, if a client reports that their site is using special characters (Chinese, Japanese etc), and search isn't returning results they expect, then we can switch them from 'standard' to 'extended.'