Beginner's Guide To Searching MAP

Discussion in 'General Martial Arts Discussion' started by Simon, Jun 12, 2016.

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  1. Simon

    Simon Administrator Admin Supporter MAP 2017 Koyo Award

    Searching Martial Arts Planet

    Possibly the most important part of posting is seeing if it has already been done/asked before.
    A quick search can save being flamed or your thread being closed.
    There are two ways to search the forum: a basic search and an advanced search. To perform a search, click the Search button from the lower menu-bar:

    Search.jpg

    This is the basic search box. To run a basic search, simply type your criteria (what you want to search for) in the box and click Go. clicking Advanced Search below the basic search box opens a page like this:

    0239.jpg

    On this page, there are seven areas that can narrow down your search results:

    Search by Key Word

    This is the same as the basic search.
    All of the options on the lower part of this page are used to narrow-down the criteria in this box.
    Below the box, there is a small drop-down with two options: Search Entire Posts and Search Titles Only. these do exactly as they say: choose whether your search applies to every word in a post or just the post titles.

    Search by User Name

    Sometimes you may want to search by people’s User Names instead of by a word, or possibly by both.
    Maybe you have seen a post by somebody that you thought was useful and want to find it again. Simply type in a User Name in the User Name: box.

    Search Options

    These options allow you to narrow-down the criteria you typed in above:

    Find Threads with

    Here there is a drop-down with two options: At Least and At Most and a box where you can input a number of replies. Choose one option from the drop-down then enter a number in the box.

    Search in Forum

    To restrict your search to only one area or one forum, you can select the forum from the list e.g. to find your answer in the General Discussion forum, simply click General Discussion then Search Now. to search in a forum area, click the forum title e.g. Fun and Games then Search Now. To search in more than one forum, hold down the Control (Ctrl) button on your computer keyboard and click on the forums you want to search. By default, Also search in child forums is selected. It is best that you leave it selected to get better results.

    Find Posts from

    In this area, you will see two drop-downs. By clicking the downwards arrow beside the first, you will see:
    • Any Date (which is the default)
    • Last Visit
    • Yesterday
    • A Week Ago
    • 2 Weeks Ago
    • A Month Ago
    • 3 Months Ago
    • 6 Months Ago
    • A Year Ago
    Simply click how far you want to go back. Next to this drop-down, there is another, with only two options:
    • And Newer (the default)
    • And Older
    Selecting one of these options makes your criteria, as an example, “Find posts from a week ago and newer

    Sort Results by

    Below the Find Posts from area, is the Sort Results by area. This area again has two drop-downs:
    • Relevancy
    • Title
    • Number of Replies
    • Number of Views
    • Threat Start Date
    • Last Posting Date (the default)
    • User Name
    • Forum
    and:
    • In Descending Order (the default)
    • In Ascending Order
    By selecting an option from each drop-down you make your criteria for this section, e.g. sort results by Thread Start Date In Ascending Order

    Show Results as

    Instead of the drop-downs used in most of the rest of this section, this time you only have 2 dots to choose from: Show results as
    • Threads (the default)
    • Posts
    with Threads selected, your results will be shown in their original threads, or with Posts selected, only the original posts that your criteria appears in.

    You may have noticed when viewing a Forum or thread that there is an option in the forum/thread header that says Search this Forum/Thread. This acts in exactly the same way as the Basic and Advanced searches covered above.

    There you have it. How to use both the Basic and Advanced Searches on Martial Arts Planet.
     
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