heather wrote:
Not at all!
First, the search box only works for posts that were added after the forum has moved last year, so all the older posts can´t be found in that way. You can still use the advanced google search (searching only in the AND forum), but for that you either need a clearly distinguishable word that doesn´t appear in every second thread, like "treat"
, or an exact quote or expression that you remember (like "he stopped death" when I want to find one of Josepha´s descriptions of Owen escaping and coming back to her). But (1) you can only know these expressions when you have already read the topic, (2) I know that not everyone has a strange memory like me that stores lots of exact phrases, like photographic but for verbal expressions, (3) even when you perfectly know what to look for, the google links for topics before the move don´t work most times and (4) it can´t find posts in the diary section, which contains almost half of this forum´s posts.
And second, there are things that people who haven´t read almost every topic here just can´t find, because there are no clearly distinguishable words in them and so you can only retrieve them if you know the context - like when I want to find a certain post by Miriam: It´s useless to search for it by looking through her 1807 posts, but because I have been here almost from the start, I might remember that it was a reply to Danee while
she was rather new here... so I only have to look through
her first few posts. Oh, and some things that you might be interested in are hidden in threads where you would not expect them - like Donald´s great description of the appropriate distance between ground poles, that you would most likely not look for in Brenda´s video topic of Lucy chasing the tiger.
Well, all I wanted to say is: don´t worry if you can´t find something, that´s what moderators are for.
Only in the Horsecare and Health departement I am rather useless, because I have just skimmed most of those topics right from the beginning, so I have never elaborated them very deeply in my memory and that is why they are not stored there.
But for the rest I am glad if I can help!
Oh, and it has a very positive side effect for me as well: in that way I have to reread those old topics, which gives me the chance to get back to some wonderfully interesting posts that I had forgotten and so I can read them again or put them into the "special posts" or "links to threads about different topics" threads if I think that they might be of special interest for other people as well.