Very good tips christyn, anyway "Search" is not working for the moment. What's going on Yippee?

Very nice post! Hopefully new members will pay attention and use your easy to follow guide.

As a mod, I get PMs daily from people who have received a warning for posting a topic that has already been posted.... Usually, these people claim that they performed a search, but did not find anything and in talking to them about how they did the search, I find that often they are doing it ineffectively. Hopefully, this topic will help those of you who may be unsure where to start when it comes to searching the forum.

First off, I should mention, when we ask that you "perform a search" before posting a topic, we do not expect you to go through pages and pages of posts and see if someone else's post smacks you square between the eyes! :krazy: We are asking that you use the nice little "Search" link that can be found at the top of the forum, on the right-hand side, just below the MMG header.

(Go ahead and scroll up now, you will see it there. )

Now, when you open that search link, the choices on how and where you want to search can get a little confusing. I'm going to keep things pretty cut and dry. Select the options that I tell you to, and you should never have a problem with double posting again....



Let's start with the "Search Options" section of the search page-

Step 1- Under "Where to Search", ALWAYS select: >>All Forums

Why "All Forums"? A lot of programs listed here can fall into one or more subsections of the forum... This will ensure that if the program is listed ANYWHERE, you will find it.

Step 2- Under the "Refine Search" section of "Search Options" (the right hand side), you will see a "Result Type" heading with 2 choices under it. ALWAYS select: Show results as posts.

Why posts instead of titles? Because, every once in a while, someone forgets to put the name of the program in their title and we do usually give them some time to fix it before closing/deleting the thread...

Now, go back up to the "Search Keywords" section of the Search page. My suggestion to you all is NOT to use the program title for your search words. If it is a title with more than 1 word in it, the system is going to search for each of those words independently as well as combined and give you more posts to sort through... I think that the best way to search is to use the link for the site (minus the www. in front of it and the .com/whatever at the end). For example, if you wanted to run a search for "Feeder Fund" (www.feederfund.com), just enter feederfund as 1 word in the search. Then, only posts with the Feeder Fund link will pop up. Another important tip: If the site link that you are searching for has a symbol, such as a dash (-) in it, like e-hyip, put it in quotes like this, "e-hyip". If you don't, all programs that have that symbol in the name with be identified by the system as matches.

So, just for review:

1)Click "Search" at the top of the forum
2) Select ">>All Forums" under "Where to Search"
3) Select "Show results as posts" under "Result type"
4)Use the site link (minus the www. and the .com) as your search keyword- If the link has a dash (-) or other symbol in it, such as e-hyip, put it in quotes like this: "e-hyip".


Anyway, I hope this helps everyone understand how to use the search tool more effectively... I know that a lot of you would like to avoid getting warnings for double posting, and I am sure that I speak for the whole admin/mod staff when I say We would love to stop having to issue them!

Christy