Hi Greg, Jean, and Sylvia,

Regarding the Search facilty, these are the answers:

Is it possible to create a field that searches for messages posted by a particular user?

No. It's a "full text search". If the posters name is "in" the messagebody, then it's treated just like any other word and is searchable (unless it's a stopword or less than the minimum length of searchable words (configured is 4 characters.

Also a date range search facility?

No.

The PRO search searches all boards and results are ordered by relevance.
There it no point for a search by date range. E.g.:

Assume someone hasn't come to the board for 4 weeks and wants to search for his family name. He may simply use the My Preferences link, set his prefs for live forum to 4 weeks and he'll see the last for weeks. Then it's pretty simple to hit Ctrl+F and search the page for his family name.

Guess that's the most likely case when someone wants to check the last "x weeks" of absence.
- and the PRO search takes "age" into account as well. Newer messages tend to be listed prior to older ones (if the other relevance criteria are similar) ... so, on PRO there is a tendency to list most recent results first.

Furthermore one can "browse" the searchindex.
If you search for a term below the results list there is a "suggestions" listing. It lists those indexed keywords for which the "first" searchterm is a partial match.
E.g.:
Start with the search for "kaigh", you'll get suggestions of similar names which "DO" exist in the index.

There are a couple of more options.
For instance if you click on one of the suggestions and look at the URL you'll see that one can put up direct links to searches for keywords. This way a user could sort of "bookmark" his favorite search and perform a new search whenever he wants. With the feature of higher relevance scores for newer posts such bookmarks basically should come up with newer search results prior to older one. "Bookmarking" the searchquery is a way for individual usage. However, this MUST be an URL like it is when you click on one of the suggestions links. The "recent searches" links are different, because cache for searchresults is limited to 72 hours (configuration variable).

Greg, if you would try this out and let us know if it works it would be great.
No answer to your URL question.
Or to my one requesting the ditching of the "Recent Searches".

Sue