The boolean full-text search capability of our forums are as follows:

[no operator]

This is what might be called a "normal" search. For instance, typing in the words: ceramic tile into the search box will return all posts with the word ceramic, all posts with the word tile, and all posts that contain both ceramic and tile.

You may want to customize your search a little. Say you want to find out about ceramic tile showers.  You could type in ceramic tile shower into the search box. This would return all posts with ceramic, all with tile, and all with shower. It will also return all posts with any combination of the three words. This might not be very helpful.

[using the + operator]

To narrow the search, you can put a + sign before any word that must be in the in the post. So searching for ceramic +tile +shower will return only posts with the words tile and shower. ceramic is optional but will be highlighted when the posts are viewed.

[using the - operator]

You can put a - sign before any word you want to require to not be in the posts returned. Say you want to find out about porcelain showers, but don't want to know about marble showers. Try this: +porcelain +shower -marble. This will only return posts which contain the worlds porcelain and shower, but do not contain the word marble.

[using the " operator]

You can search for phrases by surrounding the desired phrase with quotes, like this: "porcelain tile shower" will only return posts with that exact phrase.

Happy Searching!

One of the methods of answering someone’s question or to otherwise comment on what someone has said in an earlier post is to quote their words. Most people are familiar enough with computers to know how to copy and paste the author’s words into the body of the reply. But that doesn’t tell us who made the quote and unless you italicize or make the print bold we may not know you are quoting someone.

Here’s the simple way to attribute a quote. Copy and paste the words you want to quote into your reply. Highlight the quote and then click on the “quote balloon” which is located in the tool bar above the dialogue box in which you are typing. It’s located between the yellow square that looks like a mountain postcard and the # sign.

When you do that the following “brackets” are going to appear at the beginning and end of your quote [QUOTE] at the beginning and [/QUOTE] at the end.

O.K. you’re almost there. That will show up as a blue box and indicate that it was quoted but we still won’t know who specifically said what you are quoting. That’s where the fun comes in. In the first bracketed QUOTE install the “equals” sign after the “E” in QUOTE…like this [QUOTE=] then after the “=” sign type in the source you are quoting. Example: [QUOTE=CX], [QUOTE=Manufacturer's Handbook], etc. Now you are done.

To make sure it worked the way you hoped it would is to click on the “Preview Post” button after you have written what you want to say. Once you have previewed your reply and it looks right then click on the “submit reply” button and your post will appear on the thread with your quote correctly attributed.

The screenshot below shows what the editor will look like if one were to quote a person named CX: