Triennial (Perennial?) OLO user Ludwig complains of the near impossibility of finding a specific post of his own from his User Index (otherwise known as the User Posting History) in these words from his third post in the 'Learning to be Sustainable with Computers and Broadband' thread:

"[it is just about impossible to find a particular post way back in the annals of one’s user index! /:> | ]"

See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2277&page=0

It would be nice if some form of search capability was to be introduced into OLO in the future rebuild that GrahamY has indicated is intended, but in the interim users may have suggestions for workarounds that may achieve what Ludwig (and others) desire. This topic is intended to elicit descriptions of such techniques from OLO users, techniques that may be of assistance in the ongoing search for the holy grail of Post Perfection.

My suggestion is to create a new word processor document every time you make a post to OLO, and then copy the post as it appears on the OLO page into that word processor document. Post content will then be searchable using whatever file management tool your operating system uses. Once you are satisfied you have found the content you were seeking, you will have the opening words of the post and its date, which two pieces of information are all you need to identify the post in your user posting history page on OLO should you have a need for further thread context.

Considering the slowness with which the OLO user index loads when online, it could make sense to periodically save your complete posting history page to your hard drive. You will minimize the amount of downloading you are doing (a technique even more useful for dialup OLO users) and, more importantly, speed up access to any specific post in the OLO archive. Clicking on the specific identified post amounts to clicking on a link. Your browser, commonly Firefox or IE Exploder, will thereupon take you there direct.

OLO users, please add any suggestions here.

This can be done fairly easily with Google now. Eg this search into google:

ludwig search your own post site:forum.onlineopinion.com.au

It turns up this very thread at about the 3rd result. Note the "site:forum.onlineopinion.com.au" in the search, which limits it to returning sites just in the forum.onlineopinion.com.au site.

Alternatively, if you are a programmer like me you can just write a program to download every post from the OLO site. I have done it to generate statistics on OLO posts before. This can make them easier to search. But really, it is hard to beat what google already offers.

Well.. Pericles and CJ Morgan seem to be able to find specific sentences in my posts going back years :)

Ask them how they do it.

I think Perilous has a 6 x 4 card system with all my juicy quotes.
CJ just has his little voodoo doll.

Porky: << CJ just has his little voodoo doll >>

Indeed - and it's such a clever little doll that it knows how to do an advanced Google search, pretty much as rstuart describes.

You ought to try it, Porky. You'll find literally thousands of gems of hatred and mendacity published under your various pseudonyms, preserved forever for posterity.

That's why it's so easy to catch you out when you tell porkies.

CJ,rsuart,Forrest Gumpp
Thank you for your tips.I've never really bothered with complex Google searches but now I'll give it a whirlnext time I research
I tend to regard OLO as a chat line....I don't refer to Google for chats with people (at coffee, over the fence etc).

Although the idea of sitting down to cut code for what is to me a passtime smacks of 'carring coals to Newcastle' mind you it is a few years since I wrote any serious code.

CJ
I've solved the issue with PCraves I now ignore him unless he comes up with something worth the effort.
I write all but my trivial post on word title them by context and 'save as' simple and it works for me.