Slortar, my Nemesis TM, while you are never very far from my thoughts, unfortunately, I do not invoke your name on these boards very often. You gotta come hang out in the Rue threads, which is where I end up spending most of my time.
Or I could be silently stalking you. Which might be more flattering. Er…I mean, no, of course I wouldn’t stalk you! Don’t be paranoid!
And the large cobra left at the foot of my bed to poison me was eaten by my pet mongoose, kept for just such an occasion. You gotta try harder than that. Or hire better help.
Alas, NE Texan, you are sadly mistaken. The PC term for “little people” these days is “half pint” or “sawed off squirt.”
As for Wintermute, your time shall come. Don’t think that Rue will protect you, because I have a clever plan to distract him with pornography and nachos.
[sub]Damn, I forgot to bribe the mongoose. Did you notice the black widows I put in your pillows?[/sub]
Yes, it does stress the servers. I imagine you shouldn’t be doing it if the board is slow, and not during peak times either.
I run a vanity search about once a month. Very seldom do I get anything good. Exactly once somebody referenced the star I’m named after; you can probably guess it doesn’t come up in conversation very often.
I’m not sure which is more fun…terrorizing Wintermute by putting spiders in her pillows…or terrorizing Wintermute by making her watch Antiquarian eating said spiders.
I’ll ditto Achernar’s remarks - it is work for the server. However, I bet it’s the same amount of work as any other search, so I try to avoid searches when the board is noticeably slow (I mean, if I notice the problem, why make it worse?)
Scotticher if you do a vanity search, the point is (depending on your taste) to either find replies to posts of yours that you had previously missed, or to find people talking about you in threads you haven’t read. Either way, what you want to look for is what people would call you on the board. That’s usually your username, but it could also be a shortening of it (like everyone calls Rue de Day simply Rue), or a name you sign at the end of your posts if people reply to that, or a nickname (doesn’t someone refer to Flamsterette as Hamsterette?), or an abbreviation (more likely for people with long, wordy, usernames; I can’t come up with an example at the moment).
From the threads I’ve read, Scotticher, you could expect a lot of results, and I’m confident they would all be nice things. DeVena sounded above like she had a bad experience with a search.
I’ll do a vanity search from time to time just to see how a conversation that I took part in turned out. Sometimes I search for my name if I expect that I might’ve been quoted in a thread that I wrote something large or controvercial in. Just in case I need to respond to a question.
It’s mainly just a good way to insure someone hasn’t misunderstood something you said or keep a discussion from being left hanging. Some days nothing comes up. Others, like today, returned 15 hits. That’s what you get when you use the word “pulsing” in a thread about spiders.
To answer the OP, the issue of bumping threads with new replies is discussed in the FAQ:
I do frequent searches for my posts, and occasional keyword vanity searches. I think I’ve only found an independent reference to my username once. Part of the problem is that a lot of people call me Spoiler or SV, neither of which is very useful as a search term.
