Thanks, DX. The table has been cleaned. I'm going to add the full text index, and it may make the site unpostable for a little, while MySQL does its thang.

Type in a word or two that you can recall from the post, "pumpkin" and "avocado" for example, and hit [OK]. You'll be presented with a list of posts in the thread that have those keywords in them.

The way this is written implies that your search results will be posts that have both "pumpkin" and "avocado", but testing on b.net shows that the search uses 'or' rather than 'and' (reference). It would be useful to tell people that in the documentation. Perhaps "that has one or other of those keywords in"?

How's this:

How to Use the Jump Feature:

Say you've just come back from being planewrecked on a tropical island where there was no way to get on the internet, not even a dial-up connection made from coconuts. It's been months since you were last on the board, and you're keen to catch up on Natter, but where to begin? You could just pick up from where you left off, but that might mean wading through thousands and thousands of posts. You could hit "Recent", but that may only give you a handful of posts. What if you wanted to go back a day, or week, or even a month?

Just click on the Jump/Search link in the header, and you'll be whisked down to the Buffista time machine control panel near the bottom of the page. Just set the specific date coordinates you'd like to return to using the handy drop down lists, and hit [OK]. You'll be instantly taken to the first post in the thread on the date you entered. If there weren't any posts that day, fear not. You won't be deposited into nothingness, but rather you'll be dropped off at the first post following the date set. It's all very simple, really.

How to Use the Search Feature:

Remember that recipe for pumpkin-avocado muffins that someone posted last week in Bitches? The one you forgot to bookmark. There's a way to search a thread for stuff like that. Just click on the Jump/Search link in the header, and you'll be taken to the search box near the bottom of the page. Type in a word or two that you can recall from the post, "pumpkin" and "avocado" for example, and hit [OK]. You'll be presented with a list of posts in the thread that have either of those keywords in them.

Posts are retrieved in order of "relevance" to the keywords. There are some restrictions on keywords. Keywords of three or fewer letters, such as "ita," can't be searched, nor can very common words, such as "some" or "there." If an uncommon word appears in more than half the posts of the thread, it'll be invisible, too. User names can be used as keywords, unless they're too short, but the only results that will be returned are those where the user name appears in the body of the post. Thus, searching on "Minear" will not return posts written by Tim Minear, only those that make reference to him.

How to Label Bookmarks:

Can't remember what all those posts you bookmarked were about? You can label your bookmarks. Just go to the "View bookmarks" page. Under each bookmark there appears a box. You may type any description you like in the box, up to 100 characters for each bookmark. Hit [Enter] or click on [OK] to save the label. You must do this for each label added or edited, or your changes will not be saved. If you type in descriptions for five bookmarks, and then hit [Enter] or [OK], only the last description entered will be saved.

You guys are *good.*

Behold this gift of mangos, bananas and frangipani in gratitude. (What? We used up all the coconuts)

I'm sad because when threads get archived, I lose my bookmarks to those threads. Is there a way to restore them so I can go and save the posts I wanted to save 4evah? My dialup crashes when I try to open an archived thread.

cries

They are unrestoreable, Allyson. But if you give us a gazillion dollars so we can run this puppy on a Cray (those aren't even cool anymore, are they?) forever, we'll not need to archive again.

Pending that, nice requests to nice people might get someone to Nilly the archives and mail you the posts in question.

Pending that, nice requests to nice people might get someone to Nilly the archives and mail you the posts in question.

Like, say, to me. (I was just about to offer that, and then I saw my name on ita's post, and got all confused about her mind-reading abilities). t /natter

I went to lunch, and came back to find search and jump deployed. Whee!

Umm, the only reason I bolded the sentence in the proposed How To was to show what I'd changed. I didn't mean for it to show up bold in the actual How To page.

And bookmark labeling is deployed, too.

[link]