Discussion Forum tips, tricks and techniques

[Science Is Scary]

I couldn't find an existing thread about tips, tricks and techniques people use on this forum, so I thought I'd start one.

Searching for existing posts on a topic is a very useful technique for me. Many topics that seem new have been discussed already. At the moment, I can find no rule against replying to old threads. There may be reasons to start a new thread though.

To find the posts of someone who has their profile hidden:

• Personal Computer: Click the search bar. Enter their username in the Member textbox. Click Search.
• Mobile: Tap the search bar. Tap the cogwheel icon on the right. Enter their username in the Member textbox. Tap Search.

External search engines may have advantages over the forum search. For example, the forum search may have a 10 page limit that search engines do not. Some search engines may not index all pages. I've seen at least one thread that wasn't present in Google's index but may have been in Bing's index. No one search engine necessarily has everything.

• Bing search of forum - Use the site:sanctionedsuicide.com command and add other search terms
• Google search of forum - Use the site:sanctionedsuicide.com command and add other search terms

The forum search has an advanced search, but I haven't used it yet.

What have you found useful, dear reader?

 

[Brick In The Wall]

I've not learned anything cool like that yet. But I can get behind anything that helps people use the search bar more effectively, nice write up.

 

[Science Is Scary]

More trivia:

The Incognito themes at the bottom change the SanctionedSuicide logo to something else.

Has anyone found the thread tags useful? I've not really used them before.

I'm not sure if anyone will find it useful, but the forum's sitemap https://sanctioned-suicide.net/sitemap.xml contains a list of (all?) the threads and tags on the forum. I found it useful when I wanted to randomly sample some threads from the forum. Can anyone think of any other uses?

Archive.org is a good place to place to view the site as it used to look. It may also be useful for viewing deleted or edited content.

There are many ways one can save threads in case the site goes down or the threads are deleted. The free Zotero is one method. Another is to use archive websites like archive.today.

The forum might be using XenForo as the forum software. There might be clues to additional tricks found from searching about XenForo.

 

[Brick In The Wall]

Bumping this for the Holiday wave of Newcomers.

 

[LegaliseIt!]

Bumping this for the Holiday wave of Newcomers.

Very useful information

 

[Science Is Scary]

I shared a tool for hiding reactions in the News Feed in another thread:

https://sanctioned-suicide.net/thre...ipt-to-hide-reactions-in-the-news-feed.28759/

 

[Science Is Scary]

It looks like guests can't see the search bar. We can work around that by registering an account or using another search engine like Bing or Google. The first post describes using another search engine to search this forum.

Tricks like playing with the web address (URL) didn't work for me.

Trivia: For people who are logged in, searches can be performed from the URL like this: https://sanctioned-suicide.net/search/search?keywords=tricks

 

[Science Is Scary]

User mentions

We can alert other people and put a link to them in our messages and in chat. The format is @ followed by their user name. For example @Science Is Scary gives me an alert.

Accents and spaces matter. For example, @Hasssssuùuu will work but @Hasssssuuuu will not.

Editing a user mention into a post may not cause that person to be alerted. We may have to add a user mention in a new reply or contact them another way.

People may miss the alerts, so contact them another way for important messages.

We may be able to turn off alerts from mentions of our names in the preferences.

What other tricks are out there?