Let me address the issues you have. First of all, I simply failed to reply to your comment as I have been on a vacation since the last 2 weeks and away from my work station. I replied to all the comments I could while on my phone as it suited me. So please have patience and in case you are not getting any replies.
Tests - I agree with you that we lack on unit tests on search results, and yes I will be fixing that. We have focused most of our efforts on getting a version of Solr to production that can provide delta index updates and reduce the load on our database and servers. We planned on fixing search results and relevance once Solr was in production as routine maintenance and this included unit tests. For the other side of things - like the response writer and the index updater - we have ample unit tests which can be found here and here
Using “Solr defaults” -
Search is a difficult thing to get right, and people assume it’s easy since the only benchmark you have to compare with is Google. And they are amazing at this. As I am sure you would know, it’s not that easy. If you find something missing its because we have had to make trade-offs and not because we were lazy-ing around and stuck to “Solr defaults”. Heck, it is anything but defaults. We have an entire repo dedicated just to our own custom Solr configuration mbsssss, with over 100 commits just in the last 6 months. It took a lot of time and effort to get to current standards (as evident in the commit history).
“Not enough time to give feedback” -
I have been working simply on the search results part, since the last 6 months, ever since the launch of Solr on our test website. Infact I asked even asked for help and feedback on our blog back in January. Community members who have been involved with the process know about it and members like @reosarevok, @CatQuest, @Freso, @Leo_Verto, @rob @rdswift and others have been continuously helping me with testing and improvements - which let me tell you have improved a lot. (in fact the “!!!” case was reported long before you did https://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/brainzbot/metabrainz/2018-05-18/?msg=4179451&page=2 )
Also to put things in perspective, I am the only person who is working on Search currently and since the last year. It’s very much unfair of you to assume that I can reply to each and every improvement and suggestion.
Which brings us to the last part “Moving things away from the ticket tracker” -
Since you cannot put search results and relevance in absolute terms, where 1 result is entirely right and 1 is entirely wrong - I wanted to funnel all improvements to search results first to the forum, so that experienced users and editors (and people who have a basic understanding of how our search is expected to work - for eg. @reosarevok) can give their opinion on it, and in case if there is a community consensus on it (that it is indeed and improvement that is needed( for eg https://tickets.metabrainz.org/projects/SOLR/issues/SOLR-89) and is not something that users have come to expect as a by-product of the ill-tuned old search for eg - https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/SOLR-86 ), we can then make a related ticket on the ticket tracker(as we have done with SOLR-89 to allow for partial matches). This is also the reason I originally closed your SOLR-88 since it felt like a subjective “improvement” and I wanted community opinion on it before filing it as a “bug” like you did - because a side effect of fixing that would be deterioration of results for queries like https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=bach&type=artist&limit=25&method=advanced
Also your reported “bug” is similar to the clay search I posted about below and can be done with https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=“fred”&type=artist&limit=25&method=indexed the following query.
There is another reason for doing so - The discourse account is linked directly with a user’s MB account. As such they can simply use oauth and sign into Discourse. This is in contrast with Jira where a person has to sign up for a new account, which a lot of everyday users won’t take effort to do.
As I wanted wide-spread feedback and a collective place for it, I chose discourse.
This doesn’t mean that our SOLR ticket tracker is not to be used anymore. In fact all the community confirmed search improvements and any and all bugs related to any part of our Solr search are to be filed on Jira (which they are - as you can see https://tickets.metabrainz.org/projects/SOLR/ )
So please ask for information and wait for a reply before making false accusations and spreading wrong and disrupting information in the community about the dev. team. We are an organization that puts community and community feedback above all else and their opinion is extremely valuable to us. Please do not assume otherwise. If there are some delays in response by any of the members of the dev. team it’s simply because we are stretched thin with other more pressing issues.