As you’ve probably noticed Discourse has a search function. It’s the magnifying glass in the top right hand corner if you hadn’t noticed it yet. Very much like the old forum “Search is your friend”. There are nearly 600,000 posts in the forum so there’s a lot of useful information on various topics if you go looking. Before asking a question it’s worth using search first, although the forum does try to encourage you to look at older posts before you post a new one…when you start to create a new topic you’ll see a popup window showing you some similar posts from the past and asking you if perhaps your new post is similar enough to an older post for you to look there before posting.
The search function has two modes
- Click the magnifying glass, enter something to search for and hit return. You’ll get a short list of 5 results and a ‘More…’ link at the bottom to get a longer list of results (assuming that there are more than 5 results.
- Click the magnifying glass, then click the sliders (?) icon at the right hand end of the search field. This then opens up the advanced search facility. You can then select all sorts of extra search parameters which build a search string for you, e.g. “forecast @bitsostring #weather-internet:pws-dashboard before:2023-03-01 in:unseen status:public”. Once you click the search button you’ll get a similar list as in (1).
If you can remember the search string commands you can just type them in yourself, you don’t need to open the advanced search window to use them.
If you’ve got a list of found topics displayed from a search and it’s a bit long you can always add to the search words or use the advanced features to narrow the search down further. Just change the search words and/or use the ‘Advanced filters’ link then press Search again.
There’s an extra facility in Discourse that we didn’t have in the old forum - the ability to have saved searches which are quite powerful.
You can find these in your Preferences as a ‘Saved Searches’ tab. Click Add to add a new saved search, then enter a search string, which can include the advanced filters described above. Then there’s a drop down which defaults to ‘daily’.
If you select ‘daily’ then once a day, your searches will be performed. If there are new results that you haven’t already seen, you’ll get a private message with a list of links to the posts. If you want to get an email notification, be sure you’ve enabled “Send me an email when someone messages me” in your email settings.
One private message will be created for each of your search terms. Notification of new results will be posted as replies in the corresponding topic.
Finally click ‘Save changes’.
Saved searches won’t be for everyone, but some of you might find them useful.