One of my great pleasures on the SDMB was occassionally re-searching all my past posts, and having the pleasure of revisiting conversations with my friends here, but today I found I had only my last 500 posts stored under the “Search for all posts by p.r.r.?” function.
It kills me to have to post THIS thread, since it’s going to bump another old one off the list, but I need to know: are threads 501 and up just lost? Is there some way I can set my list to include more than 500 posts?
I’m serious to the extent that if I’m really limited to 500, I need to search out places I have information that I[ll need again, and copy it onto my hard drive. One of the best things about the SDMB for me was the idea that this information would always be easily accessible–was I wrong?
From my observations, 500 is just the maximum number of hits a search will return, and your previous posts are not lost. If you pick the options of searching for posts made “a year ago” and “earlier,” you should see the remainder of your output here.
If, however, you’re a prolific SDMB oldtimer, the above options will still not capture anything beyond what you’ve written a year ago and the 500 prior threads. I’ve heard suggestions to use www.boardreader.com to check their archives, but a search there for “straightdope pseudotriton” only returned 7 hits, so that’s not very helpful, either.
If information is important to you, then by all means store it somewhere else. In the past, we’ve lost posts and threads. In addition, sometimes (though not often) we also delete threads and posts. We don’t intend to be an online storage facility.
I would also like to ask everyone to PLEASE refrain from unnecessary searches. This really puts a strain on the server, and in fact is THE hardest function that the server does.
Along those lines, in order to find threads that I remember the title of, I’ll use the drop-down boxes at the bottom of the appropriate forum window to show me threads in alphabetical order from the past few months or whatever. I usually have to click on four or five pages to find the right one. I’ve been doing this under the assumption that it’s less resource-intensive than searching, but at the same time it seems that it would have to do a lot of the same things that a search does. Am I right?
Also, the Archive link at the bottom is a minimal strain on resources too, right? That could make a good alternative to searching.
I concur w/ Lynn that searches shouldn’t be abused. Cherish them like they were a commodity. A member is allowed one search per day…oooh and can only accumulate up to three at a time. I wait until the wee hours to reseach stuff.
I hate it when folks say…“we already did this, if you would have done a search.” Then in the same breath they say…“don’t do searches, they kill the hamsters.”
So, I’m gonna beat that dead ass horse one more time. Please archive the history of the SDMB on cd’s and sell them to us. We could research topics/threads offline while debating them online. Save mucho bandwidth and make mucho dollars too. I’d want the updates every year too.
BTW ptrruber not even gonna try spelling it
Try doing a search in the earlyAM and when you specify the search, try show threads only instead of individual posts and also change the order to ascending rather than descending. It should give you the first 500 and cut off the last 500. Simply reverse back to get recent stuff.
How do I toggle from “descending” to “ascending” and vice-versa? I’m not finding where that switch can be made.
Currently, I’ve been clicking on my name, and one of the options that pops up is “search all threads by p.r.r.” but no provision is made for “ascending” or “descending” searches.
not even gonna try spelling it