Guide how to search the forum

[methosivanhoe]

A lot of the members here will admit to seeing at least one, maybe more posts regarding searching for models or videos or whatever on this forum... Thankfully a lot of the members here are more than willing to take the time to answer questions and help people find the correct threads.

What I have noticed however is a bit of confusion around how to actually search through the site for a specific thread or post, so I decided to do this guide to help people, specifically new members, find the threads and posts that they are after, and include a few tricks and tips that might even help veteran members.

Now, the Vbulletin search engine on the forum isn't the best in the world, that's widely accepted by Vbulletin users, but it can be a useful tool if used correctly...

So if you click on 'Search' at the top menu (3rd from the right) you'll see it's actually a pull down menu and not just a standard button like most of the others. Now, you have a standard search box there, you can use that for simple searches like Swimsuit, Redhead, Lingerie or whatever... But I'd reccomend going down to 'Advanced Search' instead and clicking that.

Once you click on Advanced Search, you'll be taken to a new screen, now this may look a bit confusing at first so I'll guide you through it...



So, you have your standard Keyword search, you can use this without the other options if you want, to search through the entire site for any posts or threads with that specific word included. Now, if you pulldown the menu underneith the Keyword's box, you will see that you can search for thread titles as well here... That can help narrow down the search when looking for a specific thread name like Pamela Anderson so it will only bring up threads with Pamela Anderson in the title, rather that any threads that include Pamela Anderson in the entire thread.

To the right of that we have the "Search by User Name" area... Pretty useful if you're looking through for all posts by a specific user. Another way to do this is just to find a post by that user, click on their name above their avatar, and click "View all posts by this user"... However if you pull down the menu box under the User Name: search box, you can see that again you can limit this to threads started by this user. Very useful when searching for threads started by any specific user on the site.

Now underneath you have the main Search Options. Here you can specify parameters within your search. You don't have to use these if you don't want to, but they can be very useful in filtering through some of the threads on the site that have been closed or linked with other threads.

And to the right at the bottom you have the "Search in Forum(s)" box... Now this is perhaps the most valuable tool in the search engine on Vbulletin. Using this you can narrow down your search parameters so a specific forum or group of forums. You just click the forum(s) you want to search through, hold down Ctrl to select multiple forums, and that way you can exclude specific forums like "Test Forum", "Guides/How To's", "Model ID Request" or "Funnies". This can be very useful when searching through for a specific model / name as sometimes other requests or general discussion can cloud the search engine from finding what you are specifically hunting for.

So that's the 'Advanced Search' guide through with, hopefully that should have helped you narrow down your searches somewhat, and make searching through the forum a bit easier.

Now there are a few other hints and tips to using the Vbulletin search engine that I can share with you, though these tend to be a bit advanced...

One thing that I don't think many people are aware of, is that the Vbulletin search engine, like most large search engines (Google, Yahoo and others) actually allows you to use boolean operators to search more effectively...

Here are a few boolean operators that I do use regularly while searching this site...

To search for expressions which include spaces, use the hash symbol (do not use quotes)

For example, using the term red#head will return matches for both 'red head' and 'redhead'

The asterisk wildcard also works, for example com*uter will return matches to both 'computer' and 'commuter'

It can also be combined with the boolean operators: com*uter and not computer will have the same effect as just searching for commuter

A useful trick for searches shorter than the 4-letter limit: append an asterisk
eg. Tho* (but beware this will also return any words beginning with Tho)

Now, one more trick you can use is actually to not use the Vbulletin search engine at all... Now I know what you're thinking, "why avoid using the site / forum search tool altogether right?" well simple, a lot of people actually prefer using Google to search through sites instead of the built in search engine... especially for images or specific phrases.

So if you go to Google, you can click on the search engine and use these paremeters to specify you only want to search through this specific site...

site:vintage-erotica-forum.com

So after the website address (after .com ) you can put in the term that you are actively searching for, then Google will only search through this specific website for the term used... This can be useful as Google will often come back with different results than the Vbulletin search engine... not entirely sure why, possibly just the difference between the Google search spider and the Vbulletin search code...

Anyway, I hope these tips and tricks will help you all through the muddle that is the Vbulletin search engine, it can be a mess sometimes, but it is a valuable tool in searching through this forum...

M