Hi Sue,

As an example, If I want to search for messages posted only within the last 2 months with the word "kaighin" in it, I do not have the ability to limit it to that range. If I run a query of the word "kaighin", it yields results sorted in apparently no particular order from the beginning of the archives. There is no mechanism to limit search ranges. In the old forum, the search function had a "Within the previous X days/months/years" limiter. If there was a "sort by..." feature after the results are yielded, then that would be fine.

Since I don't read every post on the board, I regularly run a query to make sure I didn't miss any "Kaighin" discussions.

Also, there is no wildcard function. This should be a fairly standard thing.

I can search for "kaighin", but "kaigh*" or "kaigh*n" does not yield "kaighin" results. This is an important feature especially with the wide variance of spellings of Manx names. In this example, I now have to search about 30 combinations of Kaighin spellings to exhaust the possibilities, where before a simple "*aig*n" would have yielded almost all possibilities.

But I really think the big deal is the loss of permanence of the old URLs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who linked discussion topics in their personal notes or databases. The upgrade invalidated all of the old links (this also includes any links posted within forum messages referring to previous messages). As I mentioned, in my database (and on my website), there are hundreds of such linked URLs.