Many Templates Have 'Do Not Enter' Sign

[galleherjazz]

Recently I am noticing that many of my templates have the international DO NOT ENTER sign beside them during my searches. When I place my cursor over the template name, it says, "Failed to load page." What does this mean? Am I doing something wrong, have a setting incorrect?

Also, how to I get torrent site templates to add to my Vuze?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[FeRDNYC]

Recently I am noticing that many of my templates have the international DO NOT ENTER sign beside them during my searches. When I place my cursor over the template name, it says, "Failed to load page." What does this mean? Am I doing something wrong, have a setting incorrect?

 

The circle with a diagonal line through it ?, while sometimes understood as "NO ENTRY" in certain contexts, is really just a general symbol for "NO". (As initially popularized in "NO SMOKING" signs, consisting of a cigarette enclosed inside the crossed-circle "NO" symbol.)

Unicode actually includes two characters, one with a left-leaning diagonal line labeled "NO ENTRY", and another with a right-leaning diagonal line labeled "PROHIBITED SIGN". But to my knowledge that distinction isn't officially made, and it certainly isn't followed: UK road signage uses mirrored versions of e.g. the "no right turn" / "no left turn" graphic, so the diagonal's orientation simply depends on which direction the graphic points. (And, while I actually typed the right-leaning "NO ENTRY" version earlier, the editor automatically replaced my Unicode character with that red emoji where the diagonal's slanted in the opposite direction. So, meh.)

The official "NO ENTRY" symbol, as defined in at least US and UK regulations for road signage, is a solid red circle with a white horizontal line in the center, as so: ⛔ (but in red). The US version also has the text "DO NOT / ENTER" overlaid above / below the horizontal line. That symbol's also labeled "NO ENTRY" in Unicode, BTW, exactly the same as one of the two crossed-circle glyphs. Because they're all about maximizing confusion.

Regardless, to make a short story long, the symbol means that the template is failing, most likely because it's out of date. Vuze's search templates are configurations that tell it how to request and retrieve data from external sites, and only work as long as the site is A: still operating, B: responds to Vuze's search request, and C: still formats its response exactly the way the template expects. It's the last one that's usually the hitch, as most changes to either the data or layout will break the template, as it needs to be updated to match.

[FeRDNYC]

The circle with a diagonal line through it ?
 

And then, to further sow confusion, the post editor here on the forum accepts my Unicode "NO ENTRY" symbol, automatically changes it to a red emoji version in the editor, and then fails to display either the original Unicode character OR the emoji replacement in the final post! ARRRGH.

At least it left the NO ENTRY sign unmolested, so that's still visible. You'll just have to trust me that the "?" there was originally a representation of the same symbol you were talking about. *sigh*

[galleherjazz]

Thanks so much, FeRDNYC! Your answer is very, very helpful.

Now, having established that the "NO" sign indicates, most likely of the possibilities you list, that the site does not have the film I am searching for, my next question is:

Is there a definitive site where I can download the most up-to-date templates for sites?

For instance, I tested my search by looking for King Kong and found many instances on Kickasstorrents, but in Vuze, I get the "NO" sign, indicating that the template is not working adequately. Or...is there a way to create a template from a torrent website?

Please don't abandon me now...you are the best resource I have found on all things Vuze! :)

[FeRDNYC]

Now, having established that the "NO" sign indicates, most likely of the possibilities you list, that the site does not have the film I am searching for,

Ooh, sorry... no, I'm afraid that's one thing you can't infer from the failure result, at least with any certainty. If Vuze was successfully making the search request to the site, and it simply returned no results, that wouldn't be a template failure condition. Vuze would show the template as funtional (green check-mark) and simply pass along the message that there were "No Results".

No, the failure means that Vuze isn't communicating with the site one way or the other, either the request it's making is not accepted or the response from the site is not understood. They may or may not have what you're searching for, but Vuze doesn't understand how to talk to the site to find out. Any information about what's available on that site would have to be obtained by visiting it in a browser and performing a search "by hand".

my next question is:

Is there a definitive site where I can download the most up-to-date templates for sites?

Not to my knowledge. And since Vuze can't legally provide or facilitate the acquisition of any templates for sites which host any illegal content, there won't ever be — not any official one, anyway. If there are any un-official ones, I don't know about them. But then, I've never really looked.

For instance, I tested my search by LALALALALALALALAAAAAAA, but in Vuze, I get the "NO" sign, indicating that the template is not working adequately. Or...is there a way to create a template from a torrent website?

There... kind of is, maybe sorta. I experimented with the process once myself, sort of as an exercise. It didn't go well.

Vuze's template system is... unique to the Vuze software, extremely complex, and not written with anything remotely like enduser management in mind. What information there is on the search template system is found in the "FAQ Meta Search" article in the Vuze Wiki. but in my personal experience there's not much there that actually helps any. The next step would be to read the actual Java code for Vuze's meta search, in the hopes of perhaps gleaning a bit better understanding of how the templates are used by the software. I have absolutely no plans to do so.

Please don't abandon me now...you are the best resource I have found on all things Vuze! :)
 

Sorry... I'd help more if I could, but the fact is that I've really never used Vuze's search — heck, I still run Vuze in the "classic interface" that doesn't include meta search. Everything I know about it is from reading the forums and/or wiki, plus the couple of times I ran Vuze in new-interface mode to get a feel for it and (as I mentioned) experiment a bit with the template system... purely out of curiosity. But I have no need of or interest in the built-in search, for my own personal activities.

All of my torrents come from search/browse pages on tracker websites, or (ideally) automatically over the sites' corresponding RSS feeds. Unlike Vuze's meta search system, RSS is a well-defined and universally supported mechanism for programmatically retrieving data from remote sites. The only difference is, it flows in the other direction, with the parameters of the feed being defined at the source before exporting them to the receiver. In practice that works better, because that way the sites can worry about (or constantly tweak) the format and contents of their site, and nothing breaks because the only thing Vuze needs to understand is how to read the RSS it generates.