Help, I have a search problem. (only 500 results?)

MazDan

MazDan

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Feb 26, 2003
Messages
16,745
I am trying to search for posts by user name.........for example trying to find the first post I made on this forum and its only going back 500 posts............it never used to do that.

I cant get anything if I try to find posts from over a year ago.

Any ideas?
 
I could very well be wrong, but i believe when the site was updated a lot of the old data was removed. I also have tried to search for similar and never succeeded.
 
No it didnt cos I have heaps more posts of my own that i can find from longer than 12 months ago.

I suspect its a search engine problem since the upgrade.

Its just a pain cos i needed to do some research and thats stuffed me......lol.

Im hoping there is a way but I dont know it.
 
You can find your first post by sorting the post in ascending order. If you want to find the block between your first 500 and your last 500 it seems that you will have to have a keyword at least. It seems that you might be able to find the first 500 and last 500 in a certain forum, and that will narrow it down; but if there is more than 1,000 post in that forum you will run into the same problem.

Is this your first post?

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?p=1083967#post1083967
 
damo nailed it. :)

ascending order for the win. you can also play about with the dates.

drugfukkdrockstar said:
I could very well be wrong, but i believe when the site was updated a lot of the old data was removed. I also have tried to search for similar and never succeeded.
Click to expand...
nope. there has been some pruning done, but there has always been lots of notice given beforehand.

the 500 limit on results has always been there, for all the time i've been here anyway. it's purely to stop people DDOSing the server. :)
 
I think Damien just submitted his application for work in SUPPORT. Good, and more importantly 'correct' answer :)

Felix has the other information available as well - PRUNEs (at least over the past 3 years) have all been announced, usually with the specific forum getting pruned (it's never site wide) having advance notice to save any quality threads.

One other suggestion besides the Ascending-Descending toggle, might be to look for 'Threads started by this user' rather than 'All posts by this user' in the advanced search ... if that would be appropriate for what you seek.
 
Staff forum -> SUPPORT ... in case members have the same question.
 
Damo, thanks heaps mate.............. I did actually play with different ideas but not the ascending order one as i figured it would change the 500 last posts around.

I did try the thread idea but it didnt help what i was trying to achieve.

Thanks once again.
 
Damien said:
It seems that you might be able to find the first 500 and last 500 in a certain forum, and that will narrow it down; but if there is more than 1,000 post in that forum you will run into the same problem.
Click to expand...



OK I have just tried to find a persons first few posts again........first since i started this thread and its still not working so i went back and somehow i managed to miss this important line from Damiens explanation.


Bottom line is that I apparently cannot search back far enough.

Can anything be done to fix this problem please?
 
Damien said:
which person if you don't mind my asking?


Surely it must be within the first 500 posts?
Click to expand...

It was a someone with more than 5000 posts.

Try finding your own earliest posts. Thats what I was trying to do (except not for you)..........its part of research for a project Im in the middle of.


Can you find my first posts?


We used to be able to, I know because I once started a thread in Australasian social inviting people to post copies of there first post so we could have a laugh. But it appears it cant be done anymore.
 
Not my first but prolly the first one thats still on here...............so what parameters did you use mate cos I tried everything.
 
Maz, when you use the Advanced Search and search your user name, make sure you sort in ascending order, not descending.
 
MazDan said:
Not my first but prolly the first one thats still on here...............so what parameters did you use mate cos I tried everything.
Click to expand...

Damien said:
You can find your first post by sorting the post in ascending order. If you want to find the block between your first 500 and your last 500 it seems that you will have to have a keyword at least. It seems that you might be able to find the first 500 and last 500 in a certain forum, and that will narrow it down; but if there is more than 1,000 post in that forum you will run into the same problem.

Is this your first post?

http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showthread.php?p=1083967#post1083967
Click to expand...

...
 
But I did all that and it just returned the last posted 500 posts in reverse order.

I think Im having trouble seeing the trees for the woods.
 
It's not going to show you those posts that are in between without adding a keyword into the search, as Damien mentioned. I imagine if the search load was more than 500 posts, it would become very taxing on the server.
 
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