Must say I find the search engine frustrating to the point of being a bit useless !  I had some bookmarked threads on the old forum, rarely looked at but “of interest”.  Recently I want to pass some info to someone on another forum relating to the system of using 34 & 34T gears for metric screw cutting on Myford lathes, tried to find the post and failed miserably !

I put in various searches, Myford, Myford screw cutting, screw cutting etc etc many others and the results were, well hopeless !  results running into large numbers, this coupled with the slowness of the forum I gave up. It seems to look for any search word/phrase in any part of any post hence the huge number of results ?

Fortunately I have the relevant info saved so passed it along but it would have been nice to pass a link to the original article/source to the chap.

John

@johnf59703 I appreciate it’s a slight diversion from @t-b-2 ‘s topic, but it’s related;

Rather than using the on forum search, you can use Google off forum, as a general search.
It’s a bit of a problem at the moment, as Google still hasn’t fully indexed the new site, so results are hit and miss.
I entered part of your text as a search and came up with the following
The second link does a re-direct to the new forum, but the first points you to the near useless Page 404 Lego one.

Second link is self explanatory, but for the first one, click on the three little dots; that provides you with the link to the original post, copy it, and you can proceed as I did originally.

You can often get better site hits by modifying the actual search term and adding this bit on the end to specify the site name

Bill

Well, I must be super thick because I cant make the forum search engine work for me.

in the old forum you could search for topics and get a list of all similar alphabetic references topic and then could interrogate the topic threads that appeared to be most relevant.

Now what you get is just a dump of all posts relevant or not with something similar to your search term. For example, search EW lathe, there will be a couple of thousand  posts that happen to have either EW or lathe or both in, 99% of which are useless. Real progress there then.

Could somebody comment, is there actually a functional search engine to get a list of threads within topic on the new site?

If there is some whizzy way to do a useful search, can somebody place the solution in the FAQ. Or has the forum search engine just gone backwards 30 years?

Hope this this works and no 403 Michael well said and the longer they persist with ‘fixing’ it it’s never going to look right,feel right or work well. David-Clake1  has suggested better ways to go forward so maybe it’s time for a new start before everyone disappears and maybe start a group similar to how Myford Lathes group is setup

H

Thanks for the explanations, might be helpful if posted in FAQ to avoid others tearing their hair out.

And… Yeah Ok, so there is a kind of a, sort of a, work around using a third party but otherwise site search is a complete CF.

The whole offering has become a bit too clunky for me now, reminds me of AOL forums circa 1997.

It was always helpful to review old threads before posting an issue. More often than not, a problem would have been discussed/resolved in some old postings. To paraphrase Orwell, ‘he that loses the past, loses the future’. Time to move on I guess.