You can sort of play with your terms, so that you're more likely to find a post made by a certain user name though, aurelia. Look at the top of a post. See how they're always [username]space[hyphen]space[date]?

If I were to search for a post you made, to minimize the number of hits on posts by other people, which just contained your name, I would enter: your name, then a space, then a hyphen, then another space in the search field, like this:

aurelia -

That should cut down on the number of times I come across your name in posts. Most of the hits I get should be entries posted by you.

It doesn't seem to work that way, Cindy. Trying that in the latest natter gives me the posts that have my name in the text of the post, but not any of the other posts I made. (Which is the same result as just searching "aurelia" without the hyphen). IOW the top part (header?) of the post is not included in the search, which would indicate a Yes to my first question above.

I managed to find what I needed anyway.

Darn. It doesn't even work with quote marks around the "aurelia -". I would have sworn that I tried this and it worked.

I must have done a threadsuck and a "find" with my P.C. control+F thingie. Sorry.

The search currently applies to text bodies only, yes. There's no huge problem with searching on poster name. Well, apart from interface design.

I think I was the problem on searching on poster name. I'd rather we didn't. Insert boilerplate comment about how that's just me here.

Tangentially, why does that bother you, Liese?

Well, it makes it marginally harder for creepy post-stalking. It means someone'd have to put in some effort to go find everything I've ever said. On other boards I use author search functions, so I suppose I'm hypocritical. You know how Nilly feels stalkery about isolating Tim's posts. For me it user search functions kinda feel like that for everybody.

Because we're so conversation based, there are fewer times when a post should stand without context. I dunno.

On the other hand, I do see the usefulness of it. I just kinda don't like it.

All the stalking I've encountered has been from people who don't mind a little effort. And threadsucking+^F barely counts as effort. But I'm not trying to talk you out of your stance, just to impress upon anyone feeling safe that you're not.

When I was trying to find the post where Deb told me her flight number, it would have been a lot easier if I could have used the search function to sort through her F2F posts, rather than use cntl-F.

There have been enough times that I've wanted to find a post and been unable to remember anything about it other than "Posted by Betsy about a month ago" that a user search function would be really useful. I can see the stalkery side, but it's outweighed by my own self-interest.