This thing is based on MySQL's fulltext search. There are all sorts of subtle wrinkles with it, here are the main ones:

- i have it set up to use mysql's "boolean mode" and automatically put a + in front of all search terms. This seems to give more useful results, all matches have all keywords.
- results are sorted chronologically with the most recent first.
- you can put a - in front of a word to exclude it from the results.
- you can use * at the end of a word to treat that word as a prefix (e.g. rubicon* matches "rubicondom")
- you can put quotes around multiple words to match the exact phrase.
- the * doesn't work inside quoted phrases
- words less than 4 letters are ignored
- there are other words that are ignored, listed here 

 

Yep, we've been all waiting for this to start happening. Now it's here. 

searching for "mfx" returns nothing, but a search for "sock" does. 1/7 SAD!

btw, john, i'm just kidding. 

pjw
RPG
ztn
czg
JPL
mfx
ORL
otp

jam
zer
atf
rmq
soe
dm1, 2, etc.
dmc
map 

Adding the * is a workaround.

Thanks a lot for the feature metl! 

ofc * haha. 

I asked the "ultimate" question and it did not return 42, do NOT trust this folks, it's fake search. 

However, when I search for someone's username, I find posts featuring that name, but not posts by the user in question. Is this intentional? Is there a workaround?

Why this matters to me:

I try to keep track of all the information I've gathered on this board anyway (by bookmarking certain posts, etc.), but it'd be great to be able to find all my own posts in one go, and then have quick and easy access to all of the answers to questions I've had so far. At the moment I only see responses in which people explicitly mention my username.

Or I might remember that a certain user posted valuable information on whatever -- e.g. I might remember that negke posted something about, let's say, skyboxes. So I would like to be able to find that post again by searching for person's username, or username plus keyword; in this case "negke skybox" -- which currently only shows me posts where other people talk about negke and skyboxes.

Or is there another way of finding all posts by a given user which has been there all along and of which I'm just not aware? 

...and nothing came up >:( 

No editing of posts is a good thing. It makes people think better before posting. 

agreed, that would be useful and it's already on my list as a future addition. In the meantime you can try google and search for

site:celephais.net "posted by negke" skybox

Google indexes pages, not individual posts, but it should give you some decent leads. 

btw it's interesting to see who uses different words the most on this board -- for "bellend" it's basically shambler & ijed: http://www.celephais.net/board/search.php?q=bellend