Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-27661991-20190118173120/@comment-27661991-20190119010729

Fandyllic wrote: I don't think you understand...

I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought that said specific wiki was being treated special. I meant that any hard link that is included in pages on a given community is treated special for the purposes of that search page.

As an example, this link:

https://mysingingmonsters.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=community.wikia.com

Returns many results. One of which is:

https://mysingingmonsters.wikia.com/wiki/My_Singing_Monsters_Wiki:Policy

Ostensibly, the reason that page is included in the results, is because this is in the source:

So the search has no problem finding links that start with "community.wikia.com" (with whatever protocol prepended).

But a syntactically matching search (A) for links to the community itself, like this: https://mysingingmonsters.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=mysingingmonsters.wikia.com

Returns no results.

Yet this page (B):

https://mysingingmonsters.wikia.com/wiki/User:ValveAperture2

Has a matching link (C):

http://mysingingmonsters.wikia.com/wiki/

In the form of the code:

So the question is: Why does it find results for the first example, but not the second?

To which my hypothesis was: It thinks that a link that links to its own community is an internal link, and so isn't returned. It is in that way treated special.

Now, you're right, if I go to dev.wikia.com, use the same search page, and search for 'dev.wikia.com', I certainly do get some results, thus disproving my hypothesis. I have no way to tell if it's actually returning all the pages it should there, but that's moot.

So the new questions become:

1. Why doesn't the search A find page B that has link C? On the face of it, the code uses the external link syntax, so I expected it to find them.

2. How *can* one reliably find page B containing link C (without using AWB)?

I hope that clarifies what I was getting at. If I'm just all sorts of confused, I don't mind being set straight :)