[Guide] Searching effectively

[notocactus]

I would not want to repeat what the others did. Actually, I know there are some threads on Searching but I have some points to improve their guides and I believe it will be more effectively if I have my own thread. In my thread, I have full control to update my guide with any upcoming discoveries or minor adjustments.

The guide is partially inspired from that thread [Guide] Reporting effectively (by Welsh)


Table of contents

• Introduction
• Where to Search
• Basics from the guide on Help page
• Search with hidden pages
• • Modlog page
  • Seclog page
  • Draft page
  • Search members
  • Specific user's topic list page
  • Your latest IP addresses last 30 days
  • Your report history
  • Search personal messages
  • Search with your PMs
  • Search your captcha bypass code
    
• Other guides

Introduction
In life, on the Internet, Searching is the basic work and it help our lives become easier. With search engines that become more and more effectively and productively, you can search everything that has been published publicly online. The key factor that decides your searching effectiveness is your searching skills.

In the guide, I'd like to help you know basics with Searching (aims at the environment on the forum only).


Where to Search

• Search option from main menu *
• Hidden pages

* In this guide, I write about search with hidden pages. For search from main menu, you can see the guide from the forum, or other sources (at bottom).


Basics from the guide on Help page
Read the guide on the help page, at the Searching section. You will use the Search page.


Search with hidden pages

• Modlog page
• Seclog page
• Draft page
• Search members
• Specific user's topic list page
• Your latest IP addresses last 30 days
• Your report history
• Search personal messages
• Search with your PMs
• Search your captcha bypass code
  

Modlog

Visit the Modlog page (it is also called as Deletion log). You can search for some information

• Deleted reply
• Removed topic
• Autoban user
• Nuke user

Mostly, you will use the following search command to search for potentially recent actions from moderators on that account (ban, nuke, delete posts, remove topics, etc.)

Code:

member #userid

It is basic command and you can combine with other keywords such as ban, nuke, delete, remove

Note: If a topic was trashed, the topic #0 will be displayed, instead of real topic ID before it was trashed.

Seclog

Visit the Seclog page (it is also called as Security log). The page gives you details on:

• woke up
• password reset via secret question
• password reset via email
• manual recovery, previously-queued ownership change completed

How to search in Seclog page?

• Username
• Combination of username and those 4 phrases above.

Note: By default, newbies are hidden but you can get them by clicking on Show all.


Draft page
Visit the Draft page.
It is helpful when you need to find previous versions of your posts or under-composing posts (but already clicked on preview)

• Announcement (theymos): Drafts
• You need to click on post or preview to have a draft in that page
• Save only last 100 posts/previews
• Be deleted after 7 days

A draft is now saved whenever you post or preview a PM or post. You can see your saved drafts here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=drafts

Search members
Visit the page Search members
You can search for members by:

• Username (default option)
• Position
• AFAIK, other options were disabled

The username option is most common used, enter username or part of username to search. Reminder: you search with username, not display name. Therefore, if one member changed display name and you use initial username to search, it will find you that guy but the display name will be different.

The position option: it is helpful when you need to narrow-down the search data, for VIP/ donators/ staffs, etc.

You can combine two options.

Example: Choose 2 options, and use keyword 'Staff' to search. You will get list of staff members and normal members with staff in their usernames.


Specific user's topic list page
Visit the page for specific user's topic list page

It is helpful (especially for managers or productively thread creators) when you need to find a thread of yours or someone else but you don't remember keywords. Usually, people will click on Show the last topics started by this person from Profile page. Its disadvantage is you have to scroll down to find threads you are looking for. Sometimes it takes many times (large images, big threads, etc.).

Default format to search (1292764 is my user id, change it to user id of the member you're aiming at).

Code:

https://bitcointalk.org/gettopics.php?user=1292764

Customization your search board

• Add &board=boardid at the end
• 24 is board id for Meta

Code:

https://bitcointalk.org/gettopics.php?user=1292764&board=24

Example: I bookmark my list of topics over boards this way

• Meta
• Beginners & Help
• Bitcoin Technical Support
• Reputation
• Services
• Gambling discussion

You can create your thread in Archival and save your topic list this way. It saves your time!


Your latest IP addresses last 30 days
Visit the page Your latest IP addresses last 30 days
It helps you to observe your latest IP addresses.

It's tricky to get email notifications right so that they're not too spammy. Maybe later.

For now, I added this page where you can see your IP logs for the past 30 days: https://bitcointalk.org/myips.php . You could pretty easily write a userscript to periodically check this and warn you if it's weird. (But don't scrape it on every pageload.)

I don't want to make older IP logs automatically accessible because that'd give a hacker a bunch of useful/sensitive information. But 30 days is probably not too harmful.

Your report history
Visit the page Your report history to get yours. There are differences for reporters who have 300⁺ reports and below.

Report History
Only users who have reported 300 good reports have access to this page
This is probably one of the most useful features related to reporting. Basically, this shows you a history of your reports, and whether they have been marked good, bad or are unhandled. This page can be used for ongoing evaluation of your reporting habits. Use the information on this page to improve the quality of your posts.

This tool can be accessed through the "report to moderator" page. The button to access this page looks like:

This will bring you to a page which looks similar to this:

This is the time that the report was made.

This is the topic which was reported or the post that has been reported. By clicking on this link it will bring you to the reported post, unless it has been deleted.

This is the user that was reported. These have been blurred out specifically for this thread for privacy reasons , however on your report history the username will be shown.

This is the status of the report. If the report has been dealt with, and marked either bad or good they will show this. For example, Good reports will be marked "Good", bad posts will be marked "Bad", and unhandled reports will be "unhandled".

Search personal messages
Visit the page Search Personal Messages and modify parameters for your needs.


Search with your PMs
Visit the pages below and use Up/ Down icon to sort them descendingly or ascendingly.

• Inbox
• Outbox

It is helpful when to want to filter your PMs (to find past conversations or to delete PMs from a user).


Search your captcha bypass code
Visit the page Your captcha bypass code. It help you to avoid annoyance from captcha code when you log in your account. See Captcha bypass (theymos)


Other guides

• A Complete Guideline to use forum search button properly
• [Tips] Guide for forum search
• [How-to] the Search button
• [Guide]How to detect rule-breakers.Techniques and tips.

You can also find more with Hidden pages/ features on the forum

[Cryptojurnalist]

I this Guideline for using the forum is a good idea because I notice most newbies find it difficult to use the forum effectively without moderating/deleting most of their post

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

Nevertheless, the guide focuses on searching by different concept on the forum, which some of which are not trivial to know about lest someone points them out in threads/posts like this. Posts being deleted by moderators are essentially not avoidable by using the above, as they normally fall back to reasons related to unsubstantial or low value content, plagiarism, malicious links, and so forth.

[icopress]

Tranthidung, I have no doubt that this thread is in the bookmarks of many, but it seems to me that you should think about adding a couple of lines about searching using ninjastic.space. TryNinja regularly pleases with various new features, so I, to some extent, have already forgotten how to use basic search, since I use NS on an ongoing basis, (I will not go into details, as I suppose you are already well acquainted with his creation).

[notocactus]

Tranthidung, I have no doubt that this thread is in the bookmarks of many, but it seems to me that you should think about adding a couple of lines about searching using ninjastic.space. TryNinja regularly pleases with various new features, so I, to some extent, have already forgotten how to use basic search, since I use NS on an ongoing basis, (I will not go into details, as I suppose you are already well acquainted with his creation).

My purpose is searching with forum features, not with third-party tools. So I did not mention websites from BPIP, LoyceClub and TryNinja. Obviously that if people use the forum regularly, they will know and love those websites.

Anyway, thanks for your heads up.

[notocactus]

Bump after a long time!

[notocactus]

Please don't delete the bump post above, I love it as a flag of Ukraine.

Some tricks on searching from theymos.

It looks to me like it's working as usual. (Which is to say, not great.)

I use the forum search a lot, but you really need to know how it works and how to deal with its quirks. Some tips:

• If you search for candy corn, it will return posts with both "candy" and "corn" in their bodies or subjects. The two words are keywords that can be separated, so it would match the phrase "I like candy, but I don't like corn". If you instead search for "candy corn", with the quotes, then the two words have to appear right next to each other as a single phrase.
• With the default settings, it will only return the last post in a topic that matches, even if more posts in that topic match. To change this, enable the option "Show results as messages".
• If more than about 5 pages of topics would be returned, then only an arbitrary subset of all results will be returned. To avoid this, setting a message-age restriction is often a good approach.
• If you use the search box in the upper right while in a topic or board, then it only searches that topic or board (& sub-boards).
• If one of the words in your search is incredibly common on the forum, like "the", then search will return bad, weird results, or may time-out after hanging for a long time. This applies even if the common word is in a quoted phrase, like "the president". Some decent-looking results may be returned, but posts which should be returned will not be.

Search has a number of quirks, and I'm not going to fix them all right now. In this case, your search didn't work as expected because words appearing in a large percentage of posts are not indexed within posts at all. Currently, there are 181 unindexed words, and "bitcoin" is one of them. So if you search for "bitcoin", it will not even look for posts containing "bitcoin" in their bodies, though it will search topic subjects, and it will highlight "bitcoin" in any posts found via subject-search. As another example, if you search for "bitcoin candy", it will search for messages with [both bitcoin AND candy in their subject] OR [candy in their body], even though it will highlight both "bitcoin" and "candy" in message-bodies in the results. (Furthermore, this will exceed the result limit, so you will actually only get an arbitrary subset of the possible results.)

Next time I reindex posts, probably it would be a good idea to not have any nouns in the list of unindexed words.