# A note: "Search all posts by 'user'" only goes 500 posts. **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [November 7, 2004, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544 "2004-11-07T22:33:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Tripler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripler/32/21807_2.png) [@Tripler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tripler)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/1 "2004-11-07T22:33:32Z")
Just something I noticed: I’d click on a user’s name, click on “Search all posts by this user”, and click again. I’ll only get the latest 500 posts by that user, even if they’re above 500+. Is this something new with the new server or something to the new software? Tripler I noticed it, was curious, and thought I would bring it up. ---
**Author:** ![Berkut](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a88e57/32.png) [@Berkut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Berkut)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/2 "2004-11-07T22:41:54Z")
It’s the new software. It’s a setting that can be changed, but it defaults to 500. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/3 "2004-11-07T23:09:28Z")
Actually, the search criteria default to “most recent” as well as the 500 cutoff. You can get the **first** 500 posts by a user, the last 500 posts more than a year old, etc., by varying the criteria. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2004, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/4 "2004-11-08T02:08:03Z")
> [@Polycarp](#): > > Actually, the search criteria default to “most recent” as well as the 500 cutoff. You can get the **first** 500 posts by a user, the last 500 posts more than a year old, etc., by varying the criteria. There doesn’t look to be a way of manipulating this with via the search url. A search for Polycarp’s posts over a year old gave me a url that ends in “searchid=514433”. On the off chance that the ‘514433’ contains date information, I tryed changing it to “514 **2** 3”, and ended up getting someone else’s search results on the term “picture.” ☹ ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2004, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/5 "2004-11-08T15:47:25Z")
It’s a total pain in the ass. I really hope the moderators either change the default value of 500 or else add to the dropdown value list some other increments like “all posts older than 1.5 years”, “all posts older than 2 years” “2.5”, “3”, etc. Otherwise a big chunk of our history is buried where we can’t easily reach it. ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2004, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/6 "2004-11-08T16:08:16Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Otherwise a big chunk of our history is buried where we can’t easily reach it. I kind of like it there. I hate reading anything I wrote more than a few months previously. My views change so often that I almost invariably look back at myself as an idiot :p. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2004, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/7 "2004-11-08T17:25:37Z")
> [@Cisco](#): > > My views change so often that I almost invariably look back at myself as an idiot :p. If they added a “view all posts for the next 3 days” etc., you could look _forward_ to yourself as an idiot. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2004, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/8 "2004-11-08T17:50:10Z")
> [@Squink](#): > > If they added a “view all posts for the next 3 days” etc., you could look _forward_ to yourself as an idiot. 😉 :eek: Why I…I…!! 😛 ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2004, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/9 "2004-11-08T18:06:54Z")
I got some good help when I asked a similar question. > **[Only 500 past posts are stored?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=240074)** > > 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... ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2004, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/10 "2004-11-09T06:46:22Z")
I was searching for a thread in which a particular poster mentioned having performed analingus on a dog while high. It was in an old TMI thread and I did finally find it, but it would have been so much easier to just search all posts by that person (or at least their _first_ 500 instead of their last). ---
**Author:** ![Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troy_mcclure_sf/32/4150_2.png) [@Troy\_McClure\_SF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Troy_McClure_SF)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2004, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/11 "2004-11-09T16:12:34Z")
I’m with **Cisco** ; whenever I see an old post of mine, I always cringe. Reminds me of a quote on [bash.org](http://bash.org)… “I was looking through some code, thinking, WTF is this guy doing? Then I realized it was my own program.” > [@MidnightRadio](#): > > I was searching for a thread in which a particular poster mentioned having performed analingus on a dog while high. I beleive that was “The TMI Thread,” and it wasn’t analingus, IIRC. Try searching for “SDMB anthology project.” That was a thread (in MPSIMS, I think) where we linked back to all the most memorable SDMB threads. You could probably find it through that. ---
**Author:** ![picker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/picker/32/13969_2.png) [@picker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/picker)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2004, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/12 "2004-11-09T16:48:27Z")
> [@](#): > > was searching for a thread in which a particular poster mentioned having performed analingus on a dog while high. It was in an old TMI thread and **I did finally find it** You can’t mention this and not post a URL. That’s just not right… ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2004, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/13 "2004-11-09T17:06:18Z")
I would really hate to have to build my own damn index. It would take a hell of a long time. Might be easier to just build a looping routine that loaded every thread and saved it to disk and thereby give me a copy of the whole board. C’mon, for any of us who’ve been here a long time and/or have been prolific during the time we have been here, there are going to be big gaps between the first 500 and the last 500 of posts a year ago and newer/older. Likewise for topics that get a lot of attention. Please, please, do something. (Does the modern software parse and recognize the old vB searchURLs, the ones with the search params encoded in the URLstring like “…startdate=12345&keywords=albatross&perpg=20&page=20&sort=descending”? And, if so, could we use those?) As I’ve said before, it seems like the easiest solution would be to add values to the dropdown list of “Find posts from”, which gives us no way to pare down the results to dates starting farther back than one year. Although returning more than 500 hits when we need them would, of course, also help. ---
**Author:** ![TubaDiva](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tubadiva/32/507_2.png) [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2004, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/14 "2004-11-10T01:16:31Z")
I’ll talk to Jerry about the schedule re upgrades. I have been anticipating a system upgrade for quite a while now. Since any upgrade to the software brings us back to all the vB out-of-the-box default settings, I’ve been unwilling to spend a ton of hours rejiggering this board to make it more user-friendly, only to see it all vanish in a blink of an eye. your humble TubaDiva Administrator ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2004, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/15 "2004-11-10T03:20:12Z")
Reasonable. Thanks for letting us know! (& please bookmark this as one of the To Be Considered post-upgrade modifications!) ---
**Author:** ![Cisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ccd318/32.png) [@Cisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cisco)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2004, 8:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/16 "2004-11-10T08:43:12Z")
> [@Troy McClure SF](#): > > I beleive that was “The TMI Thread,” and it wasn’t analingus, IIRC. I **I** RC, it was oldscratch, trying to come from behind and beat SPOOFE’s “I masturbated with toothpaste and it melted the skin off my penis” story. And it _was_ analingus. Then again, it’s been awhile since the TMI thread. Didn’t they say no more after that one? ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2004, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/17 "2004-11-11T08:41:15Z")
> [@picker](#): > > You can’t mention this and not post a URL. That’s just not right… It was definitely analingus. [The Thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=44749) [The Post](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=872088#post872088) ---
**Author:** ![Flamsterette\_X](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/41988e/32.png) [@Flamsterette\_X](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flamsterette_X)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2004, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-note-search-all-posts-by-user-only-goes-500-posts/273544/18 "2004-11-19T23:27:56Z")
> [@Troy McClure SF](#): > > Try searching for “SDMB anthology project.” That was a thread (in MPSIMS, I think) where we linked back to all the most memorable SDMB threads. You could probably find it through that. Yes, I know the thread / post has been found already… but here’s the thread that was mentioned: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=118749](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=118749)