Searching

Pretty soon your forums will be full of topics that will span more than one topics-listing page. This will make it a bit difficult to locate a specific older topic. phpBB’s search feature comes to the rescue here. It’s accessible through the Search top-navigation link. The search form gives you many options to find your topic of interest, such as which forum to search, how to display the results, and so on.

Chances are you and your members will ignore most of the search options in your searches. After all, we are so used to simple search boxes like Google’s, for example, that we rarely look for other options. But there is one simple option here that can help you a lot. This option is Search for all terms. It helps when you search using more than one word. Unlike Google, where the results will be narrowed when you add more words, phpBB will search for each individual word and return more results (broadening the search as opposed to narrowing it). For example...