I apologize, in advance, for asking a question that probably has a, “Well duh!” answer. But… how does one search the forums for topics? The only search box that I see on the site (the one in the upper right area of the page) returns results from articles, videos, etc. but I never see results from threads in the forums.
Thanks,
It seems like most of us, including I, have had the problem. They hide it.
BUT. Not well.
Scroll down a bit on the right. Look for an emptyish box with the words “Search the Community”. That’s it.
Odd way to title a search. I first thought it might have something to do with crime and police services. Well, only for a second.
Ed
Thanks Painter Carver for asking and thanks Ed for answering that question.
I have very rarely had much success with search the comunity. I use Google and include trains.com.
I have seen this quesrtion here before with answers from others that had good results.
R$ich
Just tried it. Doesn’t seem to work too well for me…
I also just use google. Including cs.trains will usually work but you can use google to search within any website by adding “site:” and the site name. So if you want to search the forums for track plans, google “track plans site:cs.trains.com”
Use google advanced search and enter your key words at the top then be sure to enter http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/ in the box for site or domain.
It works to a fair degree if you tailor the search terms right. I do find that after a few years’ worths of results display , what seems to be spam/bot threads start to show up.
Google your term + model railroader does also work fairly well.
Thanks, everyone, for your input. It is much appreciated and I am glad that the question wasn’t so stupid, after all!
Cheers
I also found the Search the Community tool works poorly. It seems to make a list of anything, including each post in a thread, that contains any of the search words going back chronologically. And going further than the initially displayed items, then checking a thread, then going back to the list required scrolling down from the top again. This should be a priority for any future website update.
I have had success googling as folks have noted, but I’ve been sloppy by just searching “site: cs.trains (subject)”. It works but I just did an experiment.
a) I tried “site: cs.trains pickle car” and got 152k results, and only the first 8 items were from cs.trains. Not so hot.
b) I tried “cs.trains pickle car” and got 5680k results, and the first 1-1/2 pages were from cs.trains.
c) I tried “site: cs.trains.com pickle car” and got 147k results and the first 7 items were from cs.trains.
d) I tried "site:cs.trains.com pickle car"and got only 6.8k results, but 14+ pages were all from cs.trains. Note the lack of a space vs. that in (c).
The google advanced search as described above is also useful but I was interested in an easy but effective way. So I will Google (forget Edge) with “site:cs.trains.com xyz” usually (if I can remember) as that works much better than what I was doing.
If you just want to search the forums not the entire website it is
site:http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/
Thanks, again, for the two further replies. I have plenty of information now and have tried some of the Google searches suggested which have worked very well. I don’t think that I will need anything further.
Thanks, Lone Wolf. So I don’t have to remember anything, I just used that as a search (with no topic added) and added the page that appeared to my Chrome bookmark bar. Now I can simply click on that bookmark (I called it MR Search). When it gets to that page, I can just add a topic to the webpage shown in the search bar and hit search again. Very convenient.