How to - Use Search and Advanced Search

There are two different ways of searching the forums:

Search (sometimes referred to as Simple Search), and
Advanced Search

To access Search

There are two Search (Simple Search) text boxes in the forum:

In the top menu bar directly under your avatar picture, and
At the top of the left sidebar.

These simple search boxes are highlighted in pink in the image below.

Using Search

Using Search is easy:

type the keyword or words into the Search text box
Hit Enter on your keyboard (or click on the Search icon).
Result: The results will appear in relevance order - results at the top of the page will be the closest matches to your keyword(s).

To access Advanced Search

You can access Advanced Search from three text links in the forum:

In the top menu bar,
To the right of the Search icon immediately below your avatar picture, and
Below the Search icon at the top of the left sidebar.

All three of these are shown in the image below, circled in orange

Clicking on Advanced Search leads you to the Advanced Search Screen as shown below.

(note, highlighted in blue is the choose a board to search in option - you need to click on this to drop down the boards if you wish to use this option and then tick the boards you wish to search in)

Using Advanced Search

Advanced Search has a number of options that are useful in limiting search results. Following is a description of the various options and how they change search results:

Search for: This is similar to the Search text box in Simple Search - enter one or more keywords here.
Match all words (droplist): this allows you to swap between matching all the search keyword(s) (that is, all keywords must be present in the results to affect relevance) and matching any of the keywords.
by user: this defaults to all users, but you can use this to search on forum entries by a particular user.
Show results as messages (check box): shows the results in message format - the whole messages only - rather than the default set of links.
Search in topic subjects only: only returns results where the keyword(s) are in the subject line of the topics
Message age: allows you to set a range (from this many days old to that) to search within
Search order: presents results in a variety of ways. The default is most relevant results first, but you can also choose age (oldest or newest first) and size (largest or smallest first).
Choose a board to search in: you can narrow down the search results by choosing which boards/forums that you would like to search within. The default is all

If you have any questions or suggested improvements to this how to, please leave a reply to this post.

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