Until the MTStars Board is up 100% and all the bugs are out, I hope we never see - "Check the Archives" -- very rude

   The only way I have currently found to find a specific company that has a common name without also bringing up garbage is to use the ARCHIVES instead of the SEARCH option and then a standard FIND.   The Archives go back 4 years, but the way large companies are buying out small companies, and the way platforms have been changing, I think if the information is more than 12 months old, it is probably too outdated to be of any use anyway. 

   The Archives only pull up one month at a time, so if you want to go back a full year’s worth, you would have to do the search 12 times, starting with the current month and working backwards until the information sounds too old to be useful.  But it is still a lot faster and more accurate than trying to sift through all the garbage that comes up now when you do a Search for common names.

   No offense to the Moderators or whoever chose this new format, but it does leave a lot to be desired in the way of searching for older information.  I am going to assume that the Board is still working on improving this feature and that one day it will be a great deal easier to find the company we are searching for.  But in the meantime, this FIND option really does a decent job, in a fairly short period of time. 

   So, if I want information about, say, All Type Medical Transcription Service (which would never show up on a regular search even before the new format changes) I go to

1.  ARCHIVES

2.  Company Board

3.  November

4.  2009

   Then when that month’s posts comes up, I use the regular Word Find:

5.  [CTRL+F] and type in “all type” and just search down the page. 

   If there is nothing useful in November of 2009, I repeat by going to October of 2009, and so on. 

   You all get the idea and I am being way too specific.  I know. 

  The only other problem is that using Find with [CTRL+F] will only search what is visible ("Subject" words and "Nickname" words) and not any words within the threads, but as far as I could tell when I tried to search using SEARCH it does the same thing.  The only difference is that SEARCH shows the first couple of lines of the thread even though it will not find words contained in those threads.  I also think most of the MTs are pretty good about putting Company names or whatever the post is about right on the "Subject" line, even as the Reply threads go down the page. 

  Now that was kind of confusing, so I hope you understood what I mean. 

  Lastly but still an option, of course, is the tried and true Google Search:

               “mtstars all type 2009”

 which will also bring up those words, either in the "Subject" or within Reply threads, but Goggle is pretty hit and miss on picking up all the occurrences within MTStars. 

   At any rate, hopefully the Board will eventually get a faster, more accurate SEARCH function.  One with wildcards or advance search options so that it will search for only a specific 2 or 3 words as a unit, instead of breaking up the words individually when it does a search. 

   Hope this helps. 

Thanks for your suggestions - Moderator.

thanks for the help - ggmt