Making the search feature work for you (and other tips)

[Victorian]

Hi ladies

I've been hard at work using my LHCF journal space to put this together. It's called LHCF How-to's and it's all about how to take advantage of the forum tools we have available to us. Right now I've just got three articles (posting images, searching, and using tags). As other things are requested or as I come up with ideas, I'll add more. Feel free to send me any tips you might have for me to add (even if it's just an addition to an article that's already there).

I'm going to put a link in my siggy, plus you can find it by just going to the journals. I think AFashionSlave, Sistaslick, DSD, Sareca, and several others who have compiled info and links in their journals have got the right idea. There's a lot of info on the board and it can be hard to sift through it. The board can be overwhelming at times, especially for newbies. Those of us who have been around for a while or have a lot of knowledge about a particular topic can help out by creating little guides and such.

Anyhow, I've been wanting to do the searching tips for a while because
1. We have a lot of (unintentionally) repeated threads.
2. Many people have started off their threads with "I tried a search but didn't find anything helpful," or, "there were just too many irrelevant results to look through"
Sometimes it's the case that there really isn't much on the topic that poster wants to know about, but a lot of other times people are asking about things that have been discussed A LOT. It's just hard to find the past threads if you don't know how to look (And also if people don't make it easy to find their threads, something that has been mentioned before, but I mention it again in the searching article).

You can go to the new journal here: LHCF How-to's

Send in your ideas for new articles!

 

[boomboom1027]

Very Informative!

 

[PaperClip]

This was very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to assemble this information.

 

[Proudpiscean]

Wow, great idea! Thanks so much for putting this together

 

[victorious]

Great work!

Thanks BlackCardinal!

 

[missnappylady]

Thank you for setting this up. I didn't know about the wildcard *. I'll definitely be using it.

 

[Junonia]

great info! I've been trying to figure out how to post images.

 

[*Happily Me*]

nice job thanks!

 

[Precious_1]

that was very well put together, great information thanks!

 

[LovelyLionessa]

Thanks, what a blessing!

 

[Enchantmt]

Black Cardinal, that was an awesome post!! Thanks for taking the time to put that together. I added it to the sticky thread list.

 

[fallback]

BlackCardinal thanks that was really nice of you.

 

[Sistaslick]

Thanks girl! I know this will be helpful to many, many people. There's so much good stuff here that it can be positively intimidating navigating through it all---even for the oldtimers.

 

[scorpian]

thanks so much for this!!I really needed this info!!

 

[blackmaven]

That is great information well done. I am glad it is a sticky now

 

[tijay]

Very helpful...Thanks!

 

[GodivaChocolate]

Great Thread..this clears up a lot for me.

 

[Stationwagon]

Finally a search feature that actually works!

 

[Dogmd]

Thank You.. This is just what I have been looking for.

 

[Tee]

I kno this will help many people. I am glad I ran across this. I will make refrence to this thread often. Thanks!

 

[ms.gafeney]

hi black cardinal, i was trying to upload a pic into my siggy but it keeps telling me that it is exceeding 1kilobytes. what does that mean and how do i fix this? thanks

 

[sassyhair]

I found the search topic very helpful but one thing that I was looking for I did not see. How do you search a phrase? When I used the technique you mention it searches each one separately.

 

[Victorian]

I found the search topic very helpful but one thing that I was looking for I did not see. How do you search a phrase? When I used the technique you mention it searches each one separately.

As far as I can tell the match phrase option isn't turned on for searching the regular forums (it is available for searching the FAQ, I noticed).

If you really need to search for a phrase specifically, or do any kind of search that is more advanced than the options available, I would suggest you use a regular search engine and restrict the domain to this site.

For example, if you wanted to look for "ponytail rollerset" as a phrase, and not any occurrences of "ponytail" and "rollerset" separately, which you can't really do with our search engine on the site, you could do the following Google search:

"ponytail rollerset" site:longhaircareforum.com/​

 

[Mahalialee4]

Okay. This will do. I have a thumbnail in my siggy and when you click on it, it takes you to the big picture. sigh...I need skills ladies. bonjour

 

[Aussie]

it says the journal module is deactivated.... is that the site or do u have to manually activiate it?

 

[Barbara]

I really appreciate the information regarding the "search" feature. I've been using it to find information already posted.

 

[sareca]

:wow: I love it! Thanks a bunch

 

[Artemis]

Thanks so much for this post! It comes in handy when trying to circumvent the whole "white screen search" issue

 

[MsMaysRus]

Thank you so much for posting all of the helpful hints..it really did help me out alot.

 

[apemay1969]

Can I use multiple keywords?

Thanks for the information. What do you do when you want to search in a thread. For example, I have been trying to see if I should wait after putting MN on my hair for my relaxer touch up and if I do, how long.

Now if I search MN, it's too short. If I search Monistat or Neosporin than I have to manually go through all of them because when I try to search the thread, I get an empty page.

How do you search for multiple keywords. I know in other database queries, I can use AND to separate keywords but that doesnt seem to work for this one