How To Search The Family Forums!

[TCH-Sales]

Sometimes the best way to find the answer to your questions is to search the TotalChoice Web Hosting Family Forums. Within the thousands of posts that find their home here it's more than likely that your not the first nor the last person to have that problem. So you approach the search link, and you freeze up. How do you search these forums? What does all this stuff mean? Critical Mass helps explain what each term means and what to do with it.

 

Search Keywords

 

Search by Keywords - Here is where you put your question. I would start simple and put the main words you are looking for. It will search for everything so if you use the word “and” it will show all posts with the word “and in them.

 

Filter by Member Name - You don’t need to use this unless you are looking for specific posts about your subject that were made by this member.

 

Search Options

 

Search Where? – What part of the forum are you looking for an answer in? If you are unsure where to look then I suggest it be left as “All Forums”. It would be a good idea to leave the check in the “Search in child forums if sub category is chosen” check box unless you are sure of the location.

 

Refine Search – This is the most overlooked option. Leaving the settings as is will limit your returns. Here is a breakdown of the four categories.

 

Search posts from… In the drop down box you have choices from Today to Any date and then radio buttons of newer and older. The default is 30 days ago and newer. To have the best chance of finding what you are looking for you may want to use “Any date”.

 

Sort results by… Here is how the results will be displayed. The default is Last Posting Date and Descending order. This gives you the newest to oldest post format. Again you have a drop down box to further refine your options.

 

Search Where? - There are two radio buttons here; “Search entire post” and “Search titles only”. The “Search entire post” option will look through the entire post to find a match for the keywords you chose. Using “Search titles only” will only look at the titles.

 

Result Type – You have two radio buttons here as well; “Show results as topics” and “Show results as posts”. “Show results as topics” displays the results much like it looks browsing the forums. It gives the title, what forum it is in, who started the topic and so on. “Show results as posts” gives you the entire post to read.