why don`t people use the SEARCH facility

MATH

Agutka wrote:

Just 'cos you guys know EVERYTHING...

Edit:
I'm sorry if some posters have felt excluded or told off for posting repeat questions on OS. However, I would say that other boards are much more hardline on this and on going off topic than OS is and you really are shot down in flames if you don't use the search. Multiple threads and repeat subjects create more work for the board quides and make the board too bulky and repetative to read, somewhere there must be a happy medium!

Original Post:
It isn't a case of knowing everything but more a case of thinking for yourself. I don't remember reading any of your posts before so I'm not aiming this directly a you BTW:D

My three kidz bombard me with "Dad, how do I...Dad, how do I spell...Dad, how can I...?" I tell them to go and look in a dictionary, google it, or work it out for themselves. I could just give them the answers but that would make them lazy, incapable of thinking for themselves, and would only teach them that one specific answer rather than the general principle. Here is a classic egample. I often read threads titled "Can I freeze Chicken?" "Can I freeze Pork?" "Can I freeze Milk?" ofetn all posted by the same poster. The general principle is the same for nearly all foodstuffs: RAW...FREEZE1...COOK...FREEZE2 This answer is often given, but they continue to ask again, and again for each item. They only grab the answer and don't remember the principle.

Information you search out will always stay with you longer than stuff told you. The MSE search is a bit hit and miss but you can always Google, it is also much faster than starting a thread and hoping that someone reads it and bothers to post back.

I try to remember that I have had the benefit of learning basic cooking skills from being a nipper and others have not been so lucky. I only know what I know because a: I Have been taught it and b: I have made the effort to educate myself. I would recomend anyone new to cooking to go and buy one basic cook book. Dairy Book or Delia 1 would be my choice and refer to it when you need to and you will never look back.

The posts I don't mind tho cos they make me smile are: "I want to make cheese on toast but I've no cheese, no bread and don't own a toaster - any ideas?" :rotfl:

squeaky

MATH wrote:

Edit:
I'm sorry if some posters have felt excluded or told off for posting repeat questions on OS. However, I would say that other boards are much more hardline on this and on going off topic than OS is and you really are shot down in flames if you don't use the search. Multiple threads and repeat subjects create more work for the board quides and make the board too bulky and repetative to read, somewhere there must be a happy medium!

Thanks for the edit MATH.

Yes, it's been my experience that across the whole of the MSE forum the board members are generally kinder than they can be on other forums I've browsed on the web.

The Board Guides are more laid back and helpful too. Especially <blatant plug> the team on Old Style </blatant plug>

If you've been keeping an eye on the volunteers sticky (at the top of the Old Style board) you'll know that we're in the middle of a massive re-organisation and update of the existing indexes, and soon we'll have a "One Stop Shop" that will have a really good coverage of Old Style and will be an excellent and easy reference resource for members to use.

furndire

Do you think that part of the problem could be that when people post a question they don't realise that there is such a vast array of subjects already posted, that they don't know the way to ask.
A bit like when I first wanted a computer - I was asked "what do you want to do with it?"- I didn't have a clue what a computer could do, so how on earth would I know what I wanted to do with one. All I knew was I just wanted to use it one!!!!!!
I've been coming on the site for quite a while now, and spend a lot of time browsing, but am still amazed that I am coming across stuff that I didn't know existed, so would not have searched.
Maybe the Search Button should be made bigger and more prominent.

squeaky

Which is why we wrote this:-

Welcome to MoneySaving Old Style - (Read Me First)

It does need an overhaul and update, it's true. We'll be working on that once the bulk of the index reorganisation is done. Even so, it can help new members a lot.

As for bigger buttons... the best place to ask for that is here:-

Site Feedback: Questions & suggestions

spiddy100

Thank you squeaky for your post - as a relative newby I was thinking of the questions I'd asked which could maybe have been searched for, and whether I'd p-ed everyone off by posting these, but also thinking of the really warm and friendly answers that I've had from (kind and patient) OS-ers who've been happy to talk me through some of the basics.

TBH most of the questions that people ask on here could be answered elsewhere on the site, or out on the internet. Take the sour dough thread that's running at the moment for example - probably most of us could Google and find hundreds of sour doughr recipes, but how much nicer to be able to discuss it with people who have done it, to be able to ask questions, to have others chipping in with their suggestions.

The advice on searching in this thread has given me some new information too. I wonder if this could be added to the 'read this first' sticky at the top - and actually, could that sticky be made much more prominent? There are about 10 stickies at the top of the board and I shouldn't think that most newbies even notice them when they arrive, let alone know which ones are relevant to them and which ones they should bother reading. There is a *lot* of really great info for newbies in the the 'read this first' one which would point people in the right direction and avoid a lot of the redundant posts.

Edit: oops sorry, crossed with squeaky's post - my thanks were for the post higher up (no22)

squeaky

spiddy100 wrote:

The advice on searching in this thread has given me some new information too. I wonder if this could be added to the 'read this first' sticky at the top - and actually, could that sticky be made much more prominent? There are about 10 stickies at the top of the board and I shouldn't think that most newbies even notice them when they arrive, let alone know which ones are relevant to them and which ones they should bother reading. There is a *lot* of really great info for newbies in the the 'read this first' one which would point people in the right direction and avoid a lot of the redundant posts.

Edit: oops sorry, crossed with squeaky's post - my thanks were for the post higher up (no22)

Yes, more help on "search" will be added to the welcome sticky when we give it a facelift soon. I'll probably write up a single guideline post which will, hopefully, include all the tips that have been offered in this and other threads.

As for making stickies more prominent - I have asked our webmaster and the Forum Team if they could be made to be "always bold" and even a different colour - but webby is kinda busy right now with the new servers and their problems and I haven't had an answer back yet.

Perhaps that would be another good question to ask on the Site Feedback board (linked a couple of posts up).

maryb

sorry if this is a stupid question and yes, I promise I have read the stickies, but I have seen a few people refer to bookmarking a thread. Does this just mean adding it to Favourites in Internet Explorer or is there a facility on the forum itself?

I do use Internet Explorer to save interesting threads to save me having to do so many searches but if there's a better way of doing it, I'd be grateful for a pointer

MarkyMarkD

The search facility on this site is rubbish.

Sorry to be blunt, but it is.

I am sure people don't realise this (or at least, most people don't) but Google is far more useful for searching on MSE (or indeed any similar site which has a useless search engine).

It works like this.

If you want to look for "freeze milk" as earlier suggested, type this into Google:

"freeze milk" site:forums.moneysavingexpert.com

It will bring up lots of threads on the site containing those special words "freeze milk" in a phrase, and not lots of irrelevant stuff.

It's also quicker than the site's search engine, and it works without falling over.

Give it a go!

Agutka

I mostly come to MSE first and google later. I feel like I'm asking my mother, auntie, sister, uncle, grandpa for help. That's what the forum is for, surely. Google is all very well, but sometimes you have to wade through the ads, the millions of irrelevancies.

I do use the search facility, although thanks Pink, for making it more useful than I thought. But sometimes information for 2004 is just not 'fresh'. I don't like it for example when I see a title that interests me and it turns out someone just recently added a post to a thread that is two years old. It's like it's already done and dusted and if you want any clarification noone is going to read it again and you can't post a new topic because old one exists...

If you want regurgitation of same old same old, go to the Ebay board. But there new posters get a chance to get their views across even if you've seen the same topic repeated for the millionth time. But then, everyone's problem is different...

Hee hee. If you google 'stardrops' guess who's second in line?

CFC

Not everyone is pc literate, TL. I think that there's many people who have mastered the basics, but don't understand how they can use the internet to find information on many things. Not to mention that to someone fairly new or impatient or only nominally pc literate, the thousands of (often irrelevant) links that comes back confound them, not to mention that all the commercial sites come up first to really obfuscate matters.

Math, I appreciate you edited your post - but I really think that comparing people asking for help on here to your kids is going too far. If you don't want to answer somebody's question, you don't have to. Just leave it to someone else who doesn't mind answering it.

Kittie et al - the board guides do indeed have plenty to do, but I think the last thing that they would want to do is to make people afraid to post, especially new people, or to put people off. I think that creating threads asking people to stop posting is a matter best left to their judgement call.