I've been posting here for a week. I agree that 'Find' frequently gives erratic results. The biggest problem that I run into is Find results which run on to several hundred pages. Burying good information under mountains of useless information is a common tactic of bureaucracies and writers of user's manuals. Compounding this is the fact that as a natural born social and mental defective I have only seen about 30% of the episodes. What possibility is there of developing some organization to this mass of information such as archiving edited versions of common searches and combining similar threads so that they come up in searches together? I would be glad to volunteer some of my time. Responses by Senior members who are repeating other senior members comments or are just venting seems to make up a sizable percentage of the posts.

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What possibility is there of developing some organization to this mass of information such as archiving edited versions of common searches and combining similar threads so that they come up in searches together?

None, unless you talk to Groupee about modifying their Eve software. Discovery leases the software and can't change the coding themselves.

Although, the point that "Find" essentially does little besides locating all the times a question has been ignored completely because it's posted-to-death, or answered with "Use 'Find'", is a product of the fact that the insane number of duplicate posts are not allowed to be removed.

It's a nice downward spiral. Find won't easily get you the answer you want, so you post a new thread, and then are just told to use Find, and the numbers of rather useless Find results just keeps increasing. But, despite requesting "use 'Find' before posting, that appears to be the way Discovery wants the forums to function (or not function, as the case may be).

That is not encouraging. From what you say, this actually works to increase the the amount of garbage information available on a given subject. It works against the premise of the show in the first place. I am grateful for roofingguy and wv engineer, buttonsdad and others who have responded to postings and brought in their knowledge and experience when forums and software fail. I still think that some sort of master posts could be developed to clarify the most egregious examples of dense threads. Now if similar threads could be linked...

Well, yes I'm a misanthrope and automatically assume the worst of people until they show otherwise, but the other issue is that even if Find worked and/or there were more "common answers to common questions"-type threads, the fact still remains that most new members are in such a rush to share their brilliant idea with the rest of the world, and it never occurs to them that someone might have asked the same question before, that they just jump in and post a repeat, without reading that they are asked to search first (despite that being standard on most forums I've ever visited) and without looking to see if it's been posted before, so the flood of unnecessary posts bogging down the searches will still continue until the posting habits of new members change.

It is pretty discouraging to see 18 of the same question on the first page of a section (including the top 8). Yes, that has happened. Surely even if the first 17 missed the fact that someone *just* asked that, couldn't the 18th notice that the page has essentially nothing else but the question he/she is about to ask?

When I wrote up my post on the Cell Phone Popcorn, I did it because I got sick of having to explain it again and again. So I took some time, researched the subject and then put together my post. The Mythmod then decided at the time that it was worthy of being stickied. I actually am impressed that it has stayed there as long as it has. I would have thought it would have been taken down by now.

Anyway, what it comes down to is someone taking the time to do all the leg work of putting such a thread together. Our Mods Don't have the tiem to put them together, so it comes down to regular members volinteering to help releave a problem here or there.

If you think there should be a master directory of thread on common issues, then I would suggest that you take some time and build one. And then talk to the Mod; DCFanMod, about maybe getting it stickied.

That's what I did.

I will take a little time to research some of the threads and see if I can edit together a 'sticky' type master post on some subject, complete with relevant posts from existing threads. We'll see what the Moderator thinks.
People will be people, that won't change. But maybe folks who want to have a clear discussion will find it a little easier to do so. And maybe this place will be too boring for every one else.
Thanks for your comments and suggestions, guys.

My quote: "Question reality, but don't give it a lot of crap."

The problem is people who post-first-search-later. Young kids who don't pay attention. That's why there is so much garbage in the search functions.