Search is something that is a bit of a hot topic on any forum. The oldtimers want the newbies to use the proverbial search before they ever post a thread. While some get a little carried away with this, it is very helpful to try it... as it is rather annoying to see a brand new thread entitled, "How do I paint my house green?", when two threads below is a 40 post discussion on the very same topic. Don't laugh... it happens more often than you'd think. It doesn't help when people put a subject name on that thread of "Yo, I have a problem... please help". This means that anyone that wants to help, must first open the thread to see what the help is needed for. Maybe only 1 in 100 people that look in the thread, actually know anything about green paint, while 20 people that are professional green paint specialists completely skipped the thread because they didn't want to bother looking to see what it was about.

So, rule number one in searching is to name your thread well. What???? Yes, if you don't name your thread correctly, it will make it harder for other people to find it... other people with the same problem... other people that want to help... etc.

Now, on to actually searching. There is a basic search that you can get to from the second menu bar's help drop down menu. This searches the whole site and is a quick and easy first check. If you don't get what you want in that method, hit search on the top menu bar, or use the drop down on the other search menu, and go to Advanced Search. This lets you narrow your search down to a particular forum, and use more selection options. If you are looking for help, and know that its in a 1500 post thread, then using Advanced Search will let you return "posts" instead of "threads", and that will get you right to the part of the long thread that matters.

One of the biggest problems people have is that they search on 2 or 3 character keywords, and get nothing back. This is because the database isn't indexed below 4 character words. That is to help with overall site performance and keep things running smoothly. But, you need to find everthing about "rss". What do you do? All is not lost. You can use the "*" for wildcards, and a blank counts as a character in that type of search. This allows you to search for "rss*" and get what you are looking for.

If you have other helpful searching tips, please post them here.

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Mike - Been Converged?