| Posted: 19 June 2010 at 11:31pm | IP Logged
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There is a wealth of information on the Forum, but the trick is to find it......
On 19 June there were 52,480 posts in 5,162 topics in 74 Forums as depicted in the screen shot below. Obviously some of these posts are in the sections called “Jokes”, “Bar Talk”, “News Clippings” etc. Of course there are the usual complaints as well.........
This will still leave a huge number of posts containing useful information, however.
The Search Key is situated to the right of Active Topics as can be seen below:
After clicking on the Search Key you will be presented with the following screen and this is where the fun starts.
As with any database you will get more accurate results the more “unique” your search criteria is. For example searching for “MapSource” in all forums just turned up 1,901 topics. Searching for “Installing MapSource” and clicking the Phrase Radio Button immediately reduced this to only 34. Searching for “Re-installing MapSource” reduced that to only 4.
This clearly illustrates the effect the choice of words has on the results. Much easier to read through 4 topics than 1,901.....
NOTES:
Ø You can select between All Words, Any Words and Phrase. Play around with these to see how it affects the search results for the same word(s) typed into the Search For field.
Ø You can select between Message Body, Topic Subject and Username. Usually the best results are obtained by using the default Message Body. Some members have already posted thousands of times and the results will be pretty meaningless.
Ø You can select between All Forums or any of the forums listed on the drop down list.
Ø The Moderators will change a topic’s title and/or move it to the correct forum if they pick up some glaring mistake, but mistakes can slip through. It might be better therefore to leave the selection at All Forums; also because it sometimes happen that a topic could fit into more than one category.
Ø Selecting Last Post Time in the Sort Results By field is probably the best way to go and I just leave it as is. Once again, play around with the other options.
Ø Click on Start Search once you are happy with the selected options, or on Reset Form if you are not happy.
Drop me a PM if there is something that I’ve left out of the above description.
Happy searching. 
__________________
Beati pauperes spiritu.
Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur.
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Topic: How do I search for information on forum?
