Taxi Driver Online

Was aiming for 20 years at least, but unfortunately the search function only goes back to around 2012

(For any newbies who don't know the history, I recall Roy speaking about spreadsheets quite a few years ago. And it's easy-peasy to use the search function to look for 'tyres' in Roy's account. There aren't too many results, so very little effort required to quickly look at them all over the last 13 years or so that the search function goes back to )

(By the same token, Roy doesn't post that often, and the word 'spreadsheet' isn't too frequent either, so not that many results if searching Roy's profile for 'spreadsheet'. Think that's what I searched for a few weeks ago when the whole spreadsheet thing was resurrected.)

Not sure why the forum search function is time-limited either, and whether it's the same on all phpBB forums like this, or whether it's peculiar to this one. Or maybe something to do with the database/or maybe the MySQL query language that I don't have the slightest clue about

And a Google site search was also useful for searching for really old stuff, but it doesn't seem to work well at all now

(Was looking for something on here from 2009 a few days ago, and took me ages to find it. Funny thing, I'm sure I used the forum search function to successfully search for the same thing just a few months ago, so that's inconsistent with searches only finding stuff back to mid-2011 or so...)

But that's another reason this is in my view a better version of the forum software than newer versions - this one won't return search results for the likes of 'taxi', because it's too common. But it will return around 2,000 results each for both Brighton and Dundee, going back to September 2011 for each.

(For the Brighton search there are a couple of maverick results which are much older, but again I suspect that's some sort of database/MySQL glitch )

But in a more modern version of the forum I was using last year, sometimes it would return words like 'Maidenhead', 'Streamline' or 'eschew' on here (say) and state it's too common to find

(Can't recall precisely what I was searching for on the other forum, but it was roughly equivalent to the likes of 'Maidenhead', 'Streamline' or 'eschew' on here - ie words that have been used, but not anything like as often as words like Brighton or Dundee.)

But, again, I don't know whether that's maybe down to the more modern version of phpBB, or a server thing, or database/MySQL, or whatever

Anyway, better shut up now - too much detail

much of the older stuff must be archived so wouldn't show up in any search surely ?

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Don't think there's such a thing as an 'archive' as such - every one of the 400,000+ posts are simply saved in one huge MySQL database, correct me if I'm wrong.

And the 'query language' and all that stuff simply shows the newer posts first, and arranges them by topic and forum member, blah, blah.

(SQL stands for structured query language , which I think is just the programming stuff the forum software uses to search the database and display the forum messages and member information accordingly, blah, blah...)

Anyway, I'm sure it's all very straightforward for those who know about this kind of stuff, but to be honest I can't really be bothered investigating it all.

But a quick search suggests there's an administrator setting for something called a 'common word threshold', so maybe that explains what I was saying above about different forums apparently taking a different approach to what words are too common to search for...

Anyway, in the interests of my sanity probably better not to get too involved in topics like phpBB administrator boards

It's because there are two TDO databases, the latest one from 2013 ish can be searched on this version, but anything before that can, or used to be able to, be searched via Google site search. SW says that doesn't work for him but it did for me recently.

I must just be lucky.

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