How To Search The TGT Forum Quickly

[munk]

There is a huge amount of information on this forum/site that can help you boost your bankroll no end, but it's not much use if you can't find it!!! To help with that, there are a couple of options for searching the forum effectively and finding what you want quickly:

• Use the 'tag cloud'
• Use the normal search facility

I will cover tagging first because personally I find this most useful / quickest:

What is tagging and you do I use it?
The tagging feature of the forum allows you to attach a 'tag' to a thread with one or more keywords that will help everyone find the thread more easily in future. As an example, if a thread is about an invite only bonus at Bluesquare, when you're creating the new thread you might tag the message with 'bluesquare' and 'invite only' to make it easier for everyone to find the message later using tag search.

How do I search for threads using the tagging feature?
To search for a tag using the tagging functionality on the forum, go to this page:

The Gambling Times - Tags

From this page you can enter a tag keyword in the search box and when you click on 'search' any threads tagged with the tag you specified will be displayed.

There is a really cool feature though when it comes to tagging - if you enter just the first three (3) characters of a tag name, all the possible name completions for that tag will automatically be displayed for you and you can select the specific tag you're interested either by pressing 'down' and hitting enter or by clicking the tag with your mouse. Give it a go on the tags page now (ie try entering in 'bet' in the tag box, pausing for a few seconds and you should get a very long list come up with all the tags that start with 'bet')!

Here are some useful tags:

• Threads Tagged with hello world (the thread(s) to say 'hi' on if you're a new member of the forum and feeling sociable)
• Threads Tagged with guide
• Threads Tagged with beginner

How do I tag my own threads when I'm posting a new thread?
To tag a thread when you're posting a new thread, just start typing the name you want to tag your post with in the 'tags' textbox. As above, a list of tags should be displayed that exist starting with the characters that you typed - please try and use an existing tag if it already exists - the existing tags will 'pop up' when you start typing in your tag in the tags box - so for example if you were thinking of tagging your thread 'bluesquare', if you start typing 'blue' and just pause a moment, you should get a pop up list of all the tags starting with 'blue' and you can pick the correct tag from there.

Please don't create new tags unless you think they will get used by others at some point - also ideally try and keep your tags to single words, you can use more than one word in each tag, but if you can use individual words please do that - so for example if you're tagging a thread about the casino at bluesquare, please use two tags - 'bluesquare' and 'casino' and NOT just one tag 'bluesquare casino'.


Advanced Usage - automating the tag searching process in Firefox
This is a tip that I use to search quickly for tags in Mozilla Firefox - it allows you to quickly search for a tag using just a few keystrokes:

1. Enter the following URL in the address bar: http://thegamblingtimes.com/tags.php?tag=%s
2. Bookmark the URL (in Firefox 3 you can do that by clicking on the star icon in the address bar).
3. Finally give the bookmark a keyword - do this by right going into the properties for the keyword and in the keyword box enter the name you want for the keyword, make it easy to type in quickly, I use 'tgut'.

After doing the above, you can now quickly search for threads tagged with 'arbing' in Firefox by typing: 'tgut arbing' in the address bar in firefox (press 'alt-d' and type 'tgut arbing'). This makes finding tagged threads a lot quicker

Note if your tag has more than one word in it's name (for example there's a tag called 'paddy power' and that's just one tag), just enter in the tags normally (ie 'tgut paddy power') and it should find the threads tagged with that tag OK.

Chrome - this functionality does work in Chrome, although it's configured slightly differently by right clicking in the URL bar and going to 'Edit search engines'. In that dialog box you can set up your 'searches' (Chrome calls them searches, not keywords).


Searching The Forum Using The 'Regular' Search Page
The forum has a very useful search facility which you can use to find posts quickly. To use the search, click here:

The Gambling Times | Welcome To The Gambling Times

Enter the search terms you want in the 'key word(s)' box and hit enter to search. For more advanced options you can choose to only search for the keywords you enter in the title of a thread or to only search for keywords used by certain members or on certain forums.

The search page should be fairly straightforward but if anyone wants any help please let me know either in this thread or by PM.


Notes For Regular Users of the Forum
Unread/Read thread marking strategy/guide - this post might be of some use.