How to search the forum quickly

[munk]

There are a couple of options for searching the forum effectively and finding what you want quickly. You can use the 'tag cloud' or you can 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 tag a thread with one or more keywords that will help find the thread more easily in future - for 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 you (and others!) to find the message later using the 'tags' search feature of the forum.


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

The Gamblers Underground - Tags

From this page you can then enter in a tag in the search box and when you click on 'search', any threads tagged with the tag you specified will be displayed. So for example to search for all threads tagged with 'arbing', you could type 'arbing' in the search box, hit 'search' and it will show you the following page:

The Gamblers Underground - Threads Tagged with arbing

Here are some other possibly(!) useful tags:

The Gamblers Underground - Threads Tagged with arbs (threads containing arbs which you can use in match betting)
The Gamblers Underground - Threads Tagged with hello world (the thread(s) to say 'hi' on if you're a new member of the forum and feeling sociable)
etc etc

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 (has to be done then), just start typing the name you want to tag your post with in the 'tags' textbox. Please try and use an existing tag if it 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://thegamblersunderground.com/tags.php?tag=%s (the %s is very important!)
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.


Searching The Forum Using The 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 Gamblers Underground - Search Forums

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.