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Lobby: Search the Boards

The community has an excellent, comprehensive, and very fast, search engine. IMPORTANT note: It will only search the boards for which you have access, so if you search while logged out, you will get vastly different results than if you are logged in.

Community Search only searches the community boards. Site Search only searches those portions of the site which are NOT the community boards. Search is toward the left on the user command line just above the light blue Conferences breadcrumb line, and is highlighted in the image below with a arrow cursor.

Let's run a sample search. In the new window that opens, you'll see the following form:

Keyword(s) will come up blank -- in the image above I've typed in biography structure, and selected the And parameter so the search will only find topics in which those two words appear. I've chosen to search All boards and All Current Topics.

• So that you can get a feel for using the search engine, however, type in publishing and leave the round radio button set to the default Or.
   
• From Search which conference or forums, scroll down until you find Discussions.
   
• Leave Search which fields? set to All. You're not likely to find any users with publishing as part of your username, but for this search, you want to be able to search both the bodies of the message and the headers.
   
• Set the Search how many days in the past? box to any time limit you choose. You can seach the archives by selecting the check box -- you will not be able to respond to any archived topics, but you can read them, copy sections that you find interesting, and paste these sections into a new post of your own if you wish to revive a discussion. (See Boards: Post A New Message). You should get at least a few hits from this search. Click any you find interesting, and take a look.

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