Thunderstone Support Forums

Thank you for your kind reply John.

For anyone searching for a similar solution, here's what I ended up doing:

Since Webinator does not have the native skill to allow me to have a list of always-imposed full-time equivalents (largely spelling variations) and also a separate thesaurus list (the full built-in thesaurus which has alternate terms) turned on for individual words with a tilde, I have now changed course and am now pre-processing the user's search form entries using perl to include the full-time equivalents in the Webinator-friendly comma-separated format using parentheses such as (color,colour) or (Khusraw,Khusrau,Khusrow,Khusru) such that these equivalent lists are inserted in the user's query prior to submission to Webinator. This seems to totally resolve this issue and is very easy to implement.

I have not yet been able to find a way to have one thesaurus be always active while only enabling the second thesaurus when a special indicator such as a tilde is in front of a specific word.

Is there a way to have the primary and secondary thesaurus use separate "rules" so the the primary thesaurus is always active, but the secondary thesaurus only becomes active when a word is preceded by a special character such as tilde?

Okay. I've removed those changes in fpar and moved my equivalents file back to the Webinator Admin Panel. But I still need some guidance on how to modify the script to make it possible to use something like the tilde to additionally enable the original Built-In thesaurus for specific searches. Can you give me some detailed guidance on how that could be accomplished?

I'm using Webinator 27.2.0 and want to use my own equivalents file all of the time, and also allow users to add something such as a tilde to incorporate the standard Built-In equivalents file in addition to my own equivalents file.

Currently I have created the new equivalents file, have run backref, and have added the following lines near the end of the fpar function in my search script:

<apicp keepeqvs 1>
<apicp eqprefix "/usr/local/morph3/texis/equiv.d/MyEquivs">

That seems to have accomplished the first step, since my new equivalents seem to be working as expected.

Now, is there some way to add a feature which will allow a user to add something such as a tilde in front of specific terms which they would like to further expand using the original Built-In thesaurus in addition to MyEquivs?

Or, if that is not possible, is there a way to add a feature in the Advanced Settings form to additionally turn on the Built-In thesaurus in addition to MyEquivs for the entire query?

Thank you for your kind and helpful reply.

I found that the root of the problem was an Apache module called ModSecurity, which apparently thought that the nonce used in your update.html page address looked like some kind of a naughty XSS trick, so ModSecurity blocked the connection and put up the 403 error message.

In case anyone else encounters such a ModSecurity issue, here's my solution:

Since I normally connect to Webinator from a static ip address, I solved the problem by adding an Apache config statement which turns off ModSecurity for connections from my ip address.

# Check if the remote client IP matches your specific admin IP
<If "%{Remote_Addr} == 'MY_ACCESS_IP_ADDRESS'">
# Turn off ModSecurity rules processing for requests from this IP
SecRuleEngine Off
</If>

I have tried multiple browsers, and have rebooted the server, but still get the same 403 error message.

I'm beginning to suspect that the issue may be related to https. On this server, all connections are upgraded to https by Apache directives, so I can't log in on http to test this theory.

Is there any known problem caused by logging in to the Webinator 27.2.0 Admin panel using https? If so, is there a workaround?

I'm having an odd problem with my Webinator 27.2.0 admin panel. I can log in normally, I can go to any of my profiles, and everything looks normal, but when I click the "Update Live and Test" button on a Search Settings page, or click "Update" button on the Walk Settings page, the URL becomes:

https://example.com/cgi-bin/texis/webin ... pdate.html

and I get an http 403 Forbidden error.

The browser back arrow takes me back to:

https://example.com/cgi-bin/texis/webin ... kfeel.html

and everything again seems normal, until I click the "Update Live and Test" button on a Search Settings page, or click "Update" button on the Walk Settings page and get another 403 error.

Everything was working fine when I did the setup last summer, but now it is quite broken. The search engine is working fine, and it has been running all scheduled walks properly.

Where is this "update.html" file that it is trying to access? Do you have any clues about why this might have started happening?

As you suggested, I ran some diff checks and tried making my same mods where similar code appeared in the new search script in Version 7.07. And thank you for the idea about adding new functions. But that did not produce useful results. So far, nothing like what I had working before. Quite a mess actually.

So, it seems there are two possible paths forward:

1) Is there anything relatively easy that can be done to make the old search4.src,v 2.814 script work with version 7.07?? I don't need any of the new search script features. The old script did everything we needed. Is there some practical way to make the old script run?

2) Or, do you have any additional resources which could clarify and/or describe the operation of the new search script? It's twice the size of the old script and apparently has features which I'm unfamiliar with. I really don't know my way around the old script very well, and this much larger new one is rather bewildering. I found your web page "Customizing the Search", and that's the right idea, but it's a bit light on details.

Any suggestions?

We have a Centos 7 server that is currently running Webinator 6, and we want to update to Webinator 23, but since it will take a while to get our modifications of the search script working with Webinator 23, we would like to have both versions working on the same server independently.

Each version is in it's own private directory, one directory called webinator6 and the other called webinator23, and the cgi-bin calls are to cgi-bin/6/ and cgi-bin/23/ directories.

The installation and site walks with the new addition of Webinator 23 went fine, and we can do a little bit of searching and tweaking before something goes haywire and both versions suddenly fail with a license error message saying that the number of database rows has been exceeded.

What can we do to completely isolate these two Webinator versions from each other?

Thankfully, my old Webinator has performed flawlessly for these past 8 years. (Hats off to Thunderstone for such a great product!)

Now, due to the obsolescence of TLS1.0 and 1.1, I'm biting the bullet and trying to update to Webinator 23. So, I need to convert my old search_custom.vs to something which will happily work with the current Webinator package.

My current customized search script version is based on:
Webinator 6.1.0
$Id: search4.src,v 2.814 2011/12/21 22:09:22 jason Exp $

Since I haven't looked at, or thought about, Vortex for all these years, I'm a bit overwhelmed by the size of the current search script (about double the size of the old script) and its considerable difference from my old script.

I don't need any new search features over what I've had for the past 8 years, I'm just making this change to get the updated TLS. So, I'd like to get your recommendations about how to most easily create a new custom search script, based on my present script.

Is there some previous search script which would work and which is more similar to my old 6.1.0 version? Or, is there any script upgrade converter? Or, can you offer any tips, hints or clues about converting my search script??