Just now, before I posted a question onto the forum, I wanted to check that it was not already covered by an existing post. However, the search seemed to take ages to come back.

I was wondering if it'd be possible to speed it up at all.

I just tried searching and it was quite speedy for me - about one second to search each forum. It your search took longer than that then there may have been a problem with your connection being slow - not the program being slow.

The search function searches each forum separately so if you select "Search all open forums" then it will take about a second to search each forum and since there are a lot of forums it will take 30 seconds or so. You can speed this up by just selecting individual forums to search.

Selecting "Search all open forums" does not include searching the archives. To do that (and you should as there is a lot of recent info there) you need to select that separately. The Archives can be found near the bottom of the selection list.

Thanks for the lightning fast response

I searched for "privacy policy" without the quotes in all forums and took me about 2 minutes. I've just repeated the same search with the same results.

The reason I don't think it is be my connection speed is that I see this following message updating every so often:

Processing...
Please wait... we are processing your search request... We just searched forum Buying (# 2).

So far, we have found 1 matches.
Note: The search will stop once 200 - 300 matches have been found.

» Search Continuing

Thanks again and apologies for the inconvenience.

You will see that message for each forum that is being searched so if you have selected to search All Open Forums you should see that message 27 times at it searches each of the 27 forums individually.

You can save a lot of time by just searching the Archives first and then if you do not find what you are looking for search just the most likely forums. You can also search by forum category which includes all the forums in the category.

For example, if you are looking for information on Privacy Policies it would most likely be found in discussions about putting Privacy Policies on websites. So, you would select the category "Successful Web Presence" and then just the three forums under that category would be searched instead of all 27 forums. That should save a lot of time.

I have no problem with the speed, i think it has nothing to do with the site!

Speaking of searching, I think it would be an improvement to get rid of the default setting whereby items are searched for if they are "newer than 1 week." Could the time period just be left blank so that a default search would be open-ended in time? People could manually narrow a search, but an open-ended search in terms of time would be a better default IMHO. Yes? No?

Here is what the software developers say about that issue... Searches on the database going back several years are extremely intensive depending on the database size and speed of the server. If you have several people making a search and it's searching back several years it can totally lock up the database.

We set the default to 1 week as in many cases that's far enough back as people are searching for something they've seen before. You want the user to make a conscientious effort to make it search a wider range and only if they really need to search that far back....

In other words, people really should narrow their searches by using the "Advanced Search" unless they are just trying to remember a post they recently saw and in that case the "1 week" is usually sufficient. From my own experience, it seems that unless you use Advanced Search, looking back a year or more just results in too many results that are not specific enough anyway - forcing you to use the Advanced Search.

I changed the default from 1 week to 3 months - we will try that for a while.