How to use the forum search
Enter text in the search fields to search for messages
in the forum. You can search the message body, the
message subject, the author and the date posted.
When searching the subject you can use quotes (") around
two words to stipulate an exact match. You can use a
+
to stipulate that a word MUST be in the
subject and -
to stipulate that a word MUST
NOT be in the subject. And you can use an asterisk
(*
) as a wildcard (but only on the end
of words - ie a trailing wildcard).
The same rules apply when searching the body of messages
and the author of messages.
With the updated field you can specify a year, a month or
a year and a month together. The year must be in four
digit format (eg 2024
) whilst the month
can be a full month name or the shorter three letter
form (eg august
or aug
). The
order of the year and month is not important so the
month can be first or the year can be first - both would
yield the same results.
Finally, the two "match type" radio buttons allow you to
stipulate whether you want all of the search criteria
that you give to be matched or any of the criteria. By
matching all of the criteria it serves to narrow down
the search producing fewer results.