**Giraffe ** made a sly joke a long time ago incorporating his sig line “A giraffe’s tongue is 18 inches long and prehensile.”
It was hilarious and I want to include it in a current Pit thread, but I can’t remember the thread or words of the actual post. I started a search for posts by Giraffe that include the word prehensile. Of the 8 that showed, none were it.
I ran a second search for another word that appears in a different sig line, and that didn’t show the posts where that sig line had appeared.
Has it been this way all along and I never noticed? Can we change this without throwing the hamsters into a frenzy?
If we can search within quotes, I don’t see why we can’t search sig lines, since they are as much a part of the post than the quotes are.
I don’t think sigs have ever been searchable. I’ve only recently discovered that quoted text doesn’t appear to be searchable either, which surprised me, but I don’t know why.
Thing is, they aren’t. The sig is stored in your user profile, and gets added to the post on the fly whenever a thread is displayed. If I change my sig, it changes on all of my past posts. There would have to be an entirely different search routine to look through all the signatures in user profiles.
Sigs aren’t part of the post. They are the current version of the users’ sig so they are updated in real time and aren’t stored in the database of posts.
OK, that makes sense. I’d forgotten that any current sig change also alters your old posts. Too bad…I’d really like to find that joke! I tried narrowing down the search but **Giraffe ** is just too prolific.
