Searching the Forums

Searching Posts
Searching User Profiles

To help you find information that you need, the forum includes a powerful search tool.

The Post Search allows you to search for posts containing certain words, or for posts made by a certain user. It has the following fields for you to use (top to bottom):

• Forum or Category to search
  Click on the arrow in the drop-down box and select either a single forum, a single category, or 'All Forums.'

• Words to search for
  Enter the word(s) or username that you are searching for.

• Search options
  

  Click on the arrow in the drop-down box to select how you'd like to search:

  • 'And' will require all words you type in

  • 'Or' will require at least one of the words you type in

  • 'Entire Phrase' requires the words to appear together as a phrase (for example, if you want to find "Buffy's hair" but not "Buffy's blond hair")

  • 'By Username' allows you to search for messages posted by a particular user. You must spell the user's name exactly as it appears on their posts (for example, searching for "Jamie" will not turn up posts by "Jamie Marie").

• Date range
  Select the timeframe for your search. To search all posts regardless of when they were posted, select 'All posts.'

• Number of results to show per page
  Enter how many messages you want to see on each results page. The default is 25.

• Highlight search terms?
  Choose whether or not to have your search terms bold and italicized in the resulting posts. (This may break HTML, images, and links if your search term is present in the code for these items.)

If more than one page of results is found, then you can move between them using the buttons to the right of the screen (the Previous   and Next   buttons).

The Index   button will also appear on the search results page(s). Clicking it will take you back to the search page.

The User Search allows you to search for usernames, or various fields of user profiles containing certain words. For example, you could search for users with 'Buffy' as part of their username, or users who share the same hobbies as you.

• Words / name to search for
  Enter the word(s) or username that you are searching for.

• Search for...
  

  Click on the arrow in the drop-down box to choose which profile field you'd like to search.

Search results will appear all on one page. Thus, depending on your search term, the resulting page could take a while to load, especially on a slow connection. (For example, searching for users with the word "Buffy" among their favorites, or "hotmail.com" in their email address - or searching by gender - will yield a long, slow page.) Please keep this in mind when choosing your search terms.

Please Note: The forum search engine is entirely separate from the Site Search engine. If you wish to search the BuffyGuide.com site, you will need to click here or choose 'Site Search' from the Site Navigation. Also, the search box at the top of these instruction pages will not search the forums — it only searches this User Manual.