I'm trying to locate one of my posts from a few years ago, but it appears that the Search function will only retrieve a user's last 150 posts. Is there a way to up this limit?

 

The built in search engine can go back by quantity (150 items) and that's it. Years ago we had a total user post listing which was kind of interesting because the whole list was there for any one user but it went away at some point. I think the total number of posts was taking up a fair amount of space and making life hard at the administrative level. Just a guess.

However, there are a couple other way to find things. The best is the Google search window at the upper right, but a quick test shows it only finds a thousand of my own 5,000+ posts. I do not know what the reason for exclusion of the other ones is unless Google also employs a return count maximum. Oddly enough though, it went back a long time and I have heard companies like Google do an immense amount of archiving. Scary what they know...

Another technique which is really cool but kind of hit-and- miss, is this Wayback Machine. The WBM has been sending out spiderbots for years to hunt around on the internet with no particular goal, archiving what it sees ona given day in a free database. The problem is it only goes a few levels deep on any one website- broad and shallow, never very deep, and it is pretty random selecting dates to archive. You might get a few pages here and there from old APC forums one day with most of it remaining unseen, with searching queries limited to specific URLs. I have however found some really old posts from APC there.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

If you know the forum (or thereabouts) which forum the post was in, you can also narrow the search.

Use the advanced search and use your username, and choose which forums you want to look in. Narrow your search by eliminating newer posts (Find Posts from [6 months/a year ago] and [older]), and sort your results to find the post faster.

Keywords help too, but you don't need them.

 

Search still works for me, too. But Im not used to this CAPTCHA garbage with professional boards. I feel disinvited somehow by the "new" board.

 

You mean the funny looking letters/numbers used to verify registrations?

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