Problem I just discovered with the forum

I cannot find anyone's old posts. When I am on someone's profile page, I see the line, "Find all posts by __________ ".

So, I click on this, and their old posts appear - but only 10 pages of old posts. For many of us, that only goes back a few months.

I really, really want to find some info that was on some posts I responded to a few years ago. I have run searches for words that I thought were in the posts, and that hasn't worked.

So I thought I would go thru my old posts and examine them, one by one, until I found what I was looking for. But when I tried to do so, i can only see a few months worth of my posts. This is frustrating.

Please bring back the ability to see ALL of a user's posts. Yes, all of the posts that a user ever made - it is a feature that would extremely useful to me and others.

Thank you

In the "Search Options" take a look at the "Find Posts From" and "Sort results by" options. Note that you can choose how far back (up to a year ago) to start searching, and to display the oldest or newest posts first. Setting "Last Posting Date" to A Year Ago and older, and sort order in descending order, plus changing from "last post" to "relevancy" will help.

But pulling up a list of more than 300 isn't likely to happen, just because of the memory hit it would place on the server. Imagine what would happen if I could do a search on all my posts!

Try using the advanced search tool, searching the user name> search for posts or threads> other options, date.

Some times you need to fiddle with the options to get the desired results.

A little slow here. What Jon said

You could also search individual forums, then you have 300 last from that/those forum.

Reason search result list size is limited is mostly technical, Sphinx engine has internal limit of maximum results, to keep searches incredibly fast and fit results in small RAM footprint.

Why not try also Google? Enter to Google:

Tom Reichner site:photography-on-the.net

and then click on the left: "Show search tools" and then select a date range.

Pekka, Skip, and Jon,

Thank you so much for your quick replies and helpfulness - it is appreciated.

For years, I have wondered why I had so much trouble finding old threads when searching for them here on POTN; thanks to your explanations, I now know why.

I will try the Google recommendation.

Am I the only "POTN geek" that has a great interest in threads that are a few years old?

Well, there's MDJAK, who delights in resurrecting the most inane of topics (the older the better), but I doubt you'd want to be lumped with him. :{)#

Geez, how do I get lumped in on everything?

There must be a way, and I guess it's Google, cause people have had no trouble pulling up my very first "trolling" post on this forum, when I switched from the dark side and commented, honestly that there were certain ergonomics I liked better about the Nikon body at the time. Pounce, that's what they did, pounced on me. Good thing I was able to wipe my tears and keep on going. Look at al the value I've brought and what you guys would've missed.