I love reading the anecdotes the Doper’s put on the board. I like reading “Astounding Coincidences from your life”, “Weird things going on for which you have no explanation of”, the thread about weird church signs, “share your personal halloween stories”, etc. I love all of it. They’re wonderful stories.
But what should I put in the search engine to look for them? I tried the simple “stories” but that came up with 146 pages of threads and most of them weren’t what I was looking for at all.
So what should I do? Should I use another set of phrases in the search engine (which I HOPE someone will clue me in towards a good set) or attempt to start a thread on the subject*?
Either a few Dopers will share their anecdotes or most likely countless more will tell me how that subject has been done already and provide me with the links I couldn’t find before.
Try restricting the search to thread titles only. I find that if I’m searching for something as broad, like personal anecdotes, it helps to not have a single mentioning of the word like “story” clogging up my results.
Also try picking specific themes, like “love stories” or “Christmas stories” or “vasectomy stories”.
To find a thread titled “Astounding Coincidences from your life”, enter “astounding coincidences” in the search field, choose the appropriate forum in which to search, and select the “Search titles only” radio button.
To find a thread titled “Weird things going on for which you have no explanation of”, enter “weird things explanation” in the search field, choose the appropriate forum in which to search, and select the “Search titles only” radio button.
To find a thread titled “weird church signs”, enter “weird church signs” in the search field, choose the appropriate forum in which to search, and select the “Search titles only” radio button.
To find a thread titled “share your personal halloween stories”, enter “personal halloween stories” in the search field, choose the appropriate forum in which to search, and select the “Search titles only” radio button.
I imagine it’ll be quite difficult to find them using the search engine because, as you’ve no doubt noticed, not all the personal anecdote threads have common terms in the title (not even “story”) and the terms that would bring up all of* them are common enough to bring up a hundred extra threads as well.
You might try “share your” as a title only search term (I’ve seen a few story threads titled “Share your ______ stories (or experiences, etc.) here”).
*I typed “og” instead of “of” three times here. Is that a Sign from Og? It is an omen?
I’d suggest another method if the search engine doesn’t work out, which would be to turn the thread view on MPSIMS or IMHO to “past 6 months” or something like that, pick a page at random (say, the 36th page, which might land you somewhere in that range), and then scan for the threads with the most replies. Or think of a particularly prolific poster that might participate in such a thread, search their user name in MPSIMS or IMHO, and scan for the threads with the most replies.
More time-consuming, perhaps, and probably no less taxing on the hamsters, but a different approach at least.
