How To Search TPP

[Wildcard]

The MyBB search engine isn't the greatest in the world for generic searches and looking at that realistically is the first step to finding what you want quickly on TPP. The second is to get familiar with the options that are provided to make your searches more specific so that weeding through irrelevant results isn't a problem.

The Main Search Window

At the top of every page there is a link to the main search window:

1. Keywords tell the engine what to look for in posts, every other setting or option is about where to look for this text. Choosing unique words to search for is very important; ordinary or common words will make searches return massive amounts of unhelpful results.
   
   Try searching for words that are particular to the post or thread you are looking for.
    
   
2. Choose whether to search the entire post (and its title) or
   
3. just the title of the thread.
   
   If you can remember anything from the title try this option first. It will yield less results, but they tend to be more relevant than when the entire thread text is searched.
    
   
4. This dialogue allows you to specify which forums to search for your keyword(s). Again, if you know which forum the thread you are looking for was in (or even the category) it will help to reduce the amount of irrelevant results that you will have to weed through.
    
   
5. If you enter a username in this field
   
6. and this checkbox is ticked then you will also refine your searches to a specific poster.
   
   NOTE: This checkbox is ticked by default, but if the above textbox(5) is empty it will have no effect on search results.
    
   
7. To specify a certain amount of replies (or a range) use this dialogue.
    
   
8. Using the date function to narrow down the search results (even slightly) is a great way to get more relevant results.
    
   
9. Thread prefixes are used in certain forums so looking for poetry exercises or polls becomes much easier when using this option.
    
   
10. Descending order would show newer results first (by last post date) and ascending would show older results first.
     
    
11. Results shown as posts show fragments of the post so that you may preview the results first 100 characters. When shown as threads, there is still a link to the post in question but no preview.

More To Come

Searches can be performed from many pages of the site through dialogues directly under the main view port in:

• The Forum Display page.
  
• The Show Thread page
  
• Your PM boxes

More info on these later, till then enjoy

[billy]

excellent post, thanks mark.

[Wildcard]

Never a problem, I will add to it when I can.