To quickly view your recent posts, and see whether there are any new posts in their threads, you can click on the gray Posts link at the top of the menu bar:



This will take you to a page where you have several options, and your recent posts will be displayed to the bottom.



Above that will be a list of your favorite forums.

The easiest way to do this is to bring up your user profile page.

This can be done 3 easy ways:

1. Click on the "posts" box in the menu at the top left of your screen.
   
   
   
   
2. Under the "My" section in the left menu of almost all pages, click on "My Page" to bring up your profile.
   
   
3. In a thread you're presently viewing that contains one of your posts, click on your User Name, and it will take you to your profile page.

There you will find your recent posts started in the past 14 days, ordered by time of post.
--
submitted by skipdawg

See also: Searching for a post older than 90 days

You can search the site from the menu of almost any page:



or in any forum from the search box in the upper right corner:



This search engine has its limitations: It will not search for phrases or multiple words adjacent to each other. It also does not explicitly support Boolean searches, such as "Cable AND expensive," "router OR switch," etc.

Putting your search words in quotes does not work.
------------------

What are "stopwords"?
Stopwords are words that are too common. If you search for a common word, like "help," the system has to retrieve possibly 200,000 posts containing "help," and the page would probably time out, or the server would bog down. If you see "(stopword)" in the results, you'll know that you used a word or character that was ignored by the search engine.

The search functionality that IS provided is equivalent to a Boolean "AND" of each term you enter.

For example entering:
router switch
... causes the search engine to find all documents containing both "router" AND "switch."
Many special characters are also ignored by the search engine, such as:
@ " +

Thanks to truckeean for this entry.

---

You can now construct a link to the Topic Search (upper right corner in each forum main page) to search for a topic in a forum. Here's how:

/topicsearch/forum-name/topic

...where "forum-name" is the actual forum name, and "topic" is the topic you'd like to search. For example:

To search for all topics related "NetBEUI" in Networking forum, one would do:
/topicsearch/sharing/netbeui
-----
Thanks to graffixx for this entry.

You can view older threads by clicking "Show Topics For" a certain number of days at the bottom of the forum page.



Why no longer than 60 days?
Paging through popular forums can be a big source of site timeouts. For the system to show you topics from 100-150 days ago, it must pull and sort, in order of date, all topics in the last 6 months in that forum. That can take an excessive amount of time if the site is also busy, and during that time, nobody can post/edit/reply at all.

It is possible to search for items older than 60 days. See this section for more information.

Please don't reply to old posts.
Going back and reading them is fine, and enjoyable, but please do not attempt to respond to an old thread. It is much better to start a new one.

The Site Search feature has two options:
1. Last 90 days
2. Older .. to 1999.



The more detail you can enter, the better chance you will have for a successful search. Entering the poster's name, selecting the appropriate forum and using keywords as unique as possible will all assist in conducting a successful and more rapid search.

Do not use quotes -- they don't work.

Note: If you use ONE search word, the search will only check the first 5000 instances of that word, across ALL posts made site-wide, regardless of user. Also, if the search word is even a little bit common, a warning is displayed that you need more terms. If you use TWO or more search words, and put the more uncommon word first, (this speeds up the search, although it's not necessary), then you will see much better results.

You may now enter a username into the quick search box:

after the word "user" as in [user fatness] (without brackets)

...and it will go straight to that user's page. You can also just enter "fatness," and you will see a link, along with other search results, but this method is slower.

Wildcards (* or ?) do not work in this case.

There is a site feature that will do that for you.

Go to this page, and you will see the search area at the bottom of the page.

---

---

Enter your desired radius and zip code, and the search will return a page of all DSLR members within that radius, sorted by premium members, and then on their post history. You may also enter city,state in the box in this fashion: HARTFORD,CT

---

To search for members, use the search box at the left side of the page:



You can use a full name, a partial name or a partial entry followed by a wildcard. (*)