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name search box / trying to find

ProfilePosted byOptionsPost Date

Antonia

Antonia Report 15 May 2011 20:57

please can we have the name search box back . it is the way to find relevant posts from members . no time to go through everyones posts to find names of interest. pretty please g/r antonia

JaneyCanuck

JaneyCanuck Report 15 May 2011 21:39

I never understood that the name search box found posts -- did it really?

I thought it searched family trees, and I found the actual tree search form much more useful for that purpose (since you start of searching by date and place).


Are you thinking of the "filter this board" box -- so you could go to the sub-board of Trying to Find for a particular surname?

It had its drawbacks, and they were major ones. A big one was that people never looked outside the little surname-board corners and saw the whole great big Trying to Find board, and this caused problems both for them and for other members.

There is still a search box at the top of Find Ancestors and each other board. If you see my post on this Suggestions board called "why is the search 'function' on this site actually a dysfunction?" you'll see what I, at least, think of it.

_______________________________________________________

Dear GenesReunited:

Is there not *some* way of identifying "Find" posts by surname, without sending people off to "surname boards" as in the past?

>>> Could there be a "tag" system maybe?
So that people could "tag" their posts with a surname?

The tag would have to be a *single word* -- or we'd keep getting nonsense like posts with "surnames" like (and I am not making these up, I preserved them):

donnellan_donlan_donelan_donellan_donnelan
pritchards in liverpool
bretts of cheshire_france
ryan f possibly ellen
gillette - francis william 1906 believed yorkshir

- sorry, Irene! but that last one did take readers to the board that said:

"Welcome to the Gillette - Francis William 1906 Believed Yorkshir trying to find board!"


With one-word tags, users could tag a post with *multiple surnames*, which would avoid the problem of the past: users looking for two halves of a couple posted separately on two "surname boards", i.e. duplicated postings.


>>> There is very definitely a need for the ability to *sort* posts by surname.
The loss of this function lowers this site's attractiveness considerably as compared to others that provide it.

It's a definite downgrade -- away from being a board where people actually spend time researching ancestors and families and helping others do the same, and toward being a bulletin board where people pay a fee, post something pretty meaningless, and run.

Antonia

Antonia Report 15 May 2011 21:49

thank you janeycanuck, i think the filter this board box is the one i used . thank you for your advice ,i will try again antonia