HELP! Answers to common forum questions

[Lamont]

I think the forums have been set up so members can only lock their own topics on certain sections of the forum. Like market square and find walking companions.

If you would like a topic not in those sections locked or moved best to report the topic/post and mods can help out.

[Pink Cap]

I just want to know how to search this forum when my topic is more than one word. For example, when I put Tasmanian Trail in the advanced search box I get 15000 hits including every forum entry with the word trail or the word Tasmanian. This is such a simple question, please can someone tell me what to do. How would I search for “Long hikes Victoria” or “Long coastal walks”? I’ve tried brackets, quote marks, + before each word. I’m sure most of my queries relate to topics where a thread already exists. Thanks.

[tastrax]

I dont think you can search for phrases in Php Forum.

https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... _advanced/

The site owners might consider adding Sphinx which I understand works quite well

https://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/current/

[wildwalks]

I just want to know how to search this forum when my topic is more than one word. For example, when I put Tasmanian Trail in the advanced search box I get 15000 hits including every forum entry with the word trail or the word Tasmanian. This is such a simple question, please can someone tell me what to do. How would I search for “Long hikes Victoria” or “Long coastal walks”? I’ve tried brackets, quote marks, + before each word. I’m sure most of my queries relate to topics where a thread already exists. Thanks.

Howdy Pink Cap
thanks for your PM on this yesterday. As I mentioned, there is a way of doing this, but I needed to rebuild the index and that takes the server some time as there are many posts to work through. It finished overnight and we are now using that new index.

tastrax is right. It is not an out-of-the-box feature with the forum we use, so I have changed that to use a database native full-text search index using pretty wide parameters so hopefully works well for most searching

You can search with quotes now like
https://bushwalk.com/forum/search.php?keywords="federation+track"

Hope that helps -- happy searching

Matt

[ChrisJHC]

You can also use a standard search engine and include the filter “site:bushwalk.com”.

e.g. searching for “long walks Victoria site:bushwalk.com” (without the apostrophes) delivers very relevant results from this forum.