Forum searching
At the top of any forum page there is a set of links including "Search", which takes you to the forum search page. This article discusses the various options available for forum searching, which may help you to find what you're looking for more easily.
The forum search page is divided into two main sections: "Search Query" and "Search Options". The first is where you enter what you want to search for, and the second allows you to control how much to search and how you want to see the results.
Search Query
You can fill in the Keyword and/or the Author box when searching; if you leave both blank it won't work. Filling in both boxes will work just fine--for instance, you could search for posts by Dr Gutenstein that contain the word Halloween.
Keywords
If you type anything into the Keyword box, the software will look for posts containing that word (or those words).
Forum searching does sometimes require trying different variations for a while to you find what you're looking for. Sometimes the discussion may have used different terms than what come to your mind, or someone might have misspelled a particular keyword in their post, or that sort of thing.
Limitations
The keyword search will only work for words that are 4 or more characters long, and it'll ignore some common words. For instance, it seems that the word "look" is omitted from the keyword searching: if you try to search for that word in the forums, you won't get any results. If you search for several words including the word "look", your results will be posts that include the other words, without regard to whether "look" is present.
(Confusingly, the word "look" will still be highlighted on the results page if it happens to be present. But the term is ignored by the forum code when actually performing the search.)
Wildcards
To the left of the keyword box it says: "Use * as a wildcard for partial matches". This means that for example you could search for proof* and you'd get all posts that contain words like "proof", "proofing", "proofread", "proofed", etc. The asterisk is a wildcard representing one or more characters.
Any vs. all terms
Just below the keyword box is a choice:
- Search for all terms or use query as entered
- Search for any terms
Ignoring the "query as entered" part for the moment, these options allow you to choose whether you want to search for posts with all of the words that you put into the box, or if you want to see all posts that have at least one of the words. If you only type one word into the keyword search, the two options have the same result.
Queries
The second half of the option "Search for all terms or use query as entered" refers to the explanation given at the left:
- Place + in front of a word which must be found and - in front of a word which must not be found. Put a list of words separated by | into brackets if only one of the words must be found.
For example, you could search for halloween -candy to find posts that mention Halloween but not candy.
Author
If you want to search for results by a particular person, enter their username into the "Search for Author" box. If you do this and leave the keyword box empty, then your search will find all posts by that user. If you put something into the keyword box as well as the author, then you'll search for posts by that person containing the keyword(s).
As with keywords, you can use * as a wildcard. For example, searching for the author rfrank* will get you posts by both rfrank and rfrank47.
Search Options
The search options allow you to control the appearance of the results and how much of the forums are being searched.
Forum
Choosing a forum from this list will limit your results to posts/threads from that forum.
Search subforums
We don't actually have subforums within any of our forums, so this option doesn't do anything.
Search within
You can choose to search only in the message (post) body, only in the title, etc.
Display results as
By default the results will appear as posts. This is usually what you want, since you can see the post when browsing the results and decide if you want to read more. It's particularly useful if what you're looking for was mentioned in the middle of a long thread, so that you can go directly to the post that matched your search.
The option to display results as topics can be useful if you're looking for a particular thread rather than any post about a topic. It's also useful for browsing short threads with accurate titles, since you can easily scroll through the results just reading the thread titles to find what you want.
Sort results by
By default the most recent results appear first but you can change the order if you want.
Limit results to previous
Here you can choose to search only among recent posts, in the time frame you choose.
Return first
This is only relevant if you select "Posts" for the display option. By default you'll only see the first 300 characters of each post in the results, but you can choose to make that longer if you want. The "All available" will display each post in its entirety.
An example
The following is adapted from a real example of someone who wanted to find information about hyphenation in French in relation to WordCheck. The person had tried searching for French hyphen word check and choosing "search for all terms".
We generally write "WordCheck" as one word not two, so that's part of the problem. Searching with French hyphen wordcheck instead brings up very few results that aren't what we're looking for, so some other changes are needed.
DP has had WordCheck since 2007; any posts before then would use "spellcheck" or "spell check" instead. One option is to try some of those variants. Another option is to open up "hyphen" a bit by adding an asterisk, "hyphen*", to find anything like "hyphenated" or "hyphenation". In searching for French hyphen* wordcheck with "Search for all terms" selected, there are a lot of hits but unfortunately the results contained a bunch of unrelated hits in the P2alt team thread. (That's because every time their projects are listed the words "hyphens" and "WordCheck" appear, so any post that also included the word "French" is showing up in these results.) You could try limiting the results to only the "Site" or "Activities" section of the forums, or just scroll through manually and see if any other hits did appear in there. Another way would be to exclude a keyword that regularly appears in the P2alt posts but would be unlikely in others.
One of the results outside of P2alt posts was a post here. That may have been part part of what the person was looking for, but some other searches are possible.
Trying the spellcheck variations such as French hyphen* spellcheck* brought up one additional useful post, here, but at a quick glance it's not clear whether anybody ever did what he suggested or not.
Finally, the contents of that last post point out a useful search term: Aspell. (Aspell is an independent spell-checking program that's used by the DP code. WordCheck is DP's code that makes various changes to the page text, runs it through Aspell, and then processes the results to display it in the interface.) So another possible search combination is French hyphen* aspell. That brings up another post with a proposed change, and a couple other results with some background that might be relevant to the question.