Searching

Searching on the old site used to be a doddle, because of new regulations regarding Data security Mike was forced to upgrade the entire site, this also involved a complete new control program. (the old one was written in Joomla which I liked, this one is written in Kunena I think, which I don't)
The first problem is that 'Recent Topics' can only be 2 pages long, so if your looking for something quite old you can't page back very far and are forced to resort to the search engine.
Once in the search engine you have to read all the page (RATS = Read All The Screen. In the 80's we used to use the acronym RTFS, but lets keep it clean!)
From the top down, you can search for a word, I don't search for phrases or multiple words, the KISS principle applies, or you can search for posts by a particular person. Not a good idea if the person is prolific like BB, Quorneng or Eric. When typing in a persons name, SLOW DOWN, type in one letter at a time and wait for the 'drop down' to update, when the persons name is being displayed select it and set any other parameters that might be relevant.
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Top left then is where we put the word we're searching for, we can choose to search just the titles (always supposing we know what the correct wording in the title was) or the entire posts. I normally search entire posts. On the right we can search on the posters name, see caveat above. Exact name doesn't seem to make much difference since the site gave you the correct name to search for anyway.
Now to search options, and here is our next problem! The search will only throw up the first 15 posts it finds! If the one you're looking for is older than that you're sitting on the sharp end of a helix!
I normally leave the selections as is except for changing the maximum number of 'finds' to 20. And this is our next problem, if there are more than 20, you only get the first 20!
Obviously it helps to know approximately when the post or thread was made but searching for a post on a specific date is almost always doomed to failure!
Ok, so you searched and couldn't find what you were looking for, it doesn't help to tell you that 'everything is still here', now you have to refine your search and the only way to do that is by searching specific categories.

When I fail to find what I'm looking for (that's frequently!) I then redo the search by selecting 'a year ago and older' this frequently finds what I'm looking for. In the case of the Thunderbolt search this didn't help because the Thunderbird had been mentioned in so many other threads. Knowing BB is pretty good at putting his threads in the correct place I selected 'Building threads' in Categories, still no dice until I tried 'Scale Models' and Bingo there it was. From there it was as simple as clicking on the thread name and adding a small post, the act of doing that bumps the thread to the top of Recent Topics (most recent date and time).
I'll say this again, everything is still here, it's just the program makes things hard to find sometimes. (The computer won't do what I want it too, only what I tell it)

I think the suggestions I would make to Mike and Pol would be, 3 pages for Recent Topics and 50 'finds' in the search engine. This would make a big difference as to whether we can find stuff or not.

Thanks Simon, just the kind of input I needed, 4 pages of Recent Topics and 100 finds, how does that sound?

Phil did speak to me about it and said he would speak to Mike, I suspect Phil's been ill again.