How do I search my private messages?

[Tortoise]

It's probably staring me in the face, but is there a way to search my inbox for a particular member or topic? There's no search option I can find in pms or through advanced search.
Can anybody help? I'm sure I'm not the first person to want to do it.
Ta.

[neilmny]

Good question tortoise. Apart from time of posting, you can display them by age (1 day, 7 days etc) and sort by author or subject, ascending or descending if that helps.
It's down the bottom of the page.

[Tortoise]

Good question tortoise. Apart from time of posting, you can display them by age (1 day, 7 days etc) and sort by author or subject, ascending or descending if that helps.
It's down the bottom of the page.

Hi neilmny,

Thanks a bunch for that. It definitely helped. I think it's still clunky if I'm looking for someone in the middle of the alphabet, though. It's trial and error clicking on page numbers and hoping for the best. Or have I missed something else?

I have the same problem finding a member if I want to send a pm and they don't happen to have posted recently (with a 'pm' to click on). Sorting by username does make it quicker. I'd still like a search button...

[neilmny]

Click the members link on the top right of the page, next to your "(Logout) username".
Then click the letter that the name starts with at the top left of that page.
Then click the "username" heading to get them into alphabetical order.
After that you will have to step through to find what you want.

[Tortoise]

Thanks, neil. I managed to work that out from your other info (the sorting making the list alphabetical by username). But if, e.g. I wanted to find a member starting with 'M', there are 16 pages of members. I only see the option of click on pages 1,2,3,4,5 or 16 (the others are just dotted). If I guessed the one I wanted might be on page 10 (and I may well be wrong), I think I have to click on p 5 to bring up pages 5 - 8, then on 8 to bring up page 10. Then it might be on page 11 after all. A search box for a user name would be much easier!

[MickyB]

Do you know the member you are looking for or are you unsure of the spelling? When composing a message there is a 'Find member' function you can use.

[Tortoise]

Ah yes, there is that. Now I'm confused about what i get confused about.
I think the problem comes when I don't get the spelling/spaces right. A search button wouldn't help that unless it went with a "Did you mean joebloggs?" feature.

[neilmny]

A "did you mean" or "sounds like" style of search function would be good for sure.
The existing one is not intuitive (if that is correct term) you have to know the full name as it is written but case doesn't seem to matter.
For instance a search for mick brings up only Mick and not MickyB as well.
A search for micky brings up nothing.

Calling Matt!

[MickyB]

A "did you mean" or "sounds like" style of search function would be good for sure.
The existing one is not intuitive (if that is correct term) you have to know the full name as it is written but case doesn't seem to matter.
For instance a search for mick brings up only Mick and not MickyB as well.
A search for micky brings up nothing.

Calling Matt!

Using your example Neil, if you add * to Mick ( ie Mick* ) then you will get 25 options that contain the word Mick

[neilmny]

Oh yeh, wild cards......I'm old Michael.......it takes me a while.

[Tortoise]

Oh yeh, wild cards......I'm old Michael.......it takes me a while.

Me too!