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The NAM site has become cluttered with garbage Forums that that are of no interest to the majority of us - the Off-Topic forums are a good example of wasted bandwidth and wasted server overhead on a MINI web site.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to search a selected set of forums for New posts -one is forced to specify a search term or username.
Worse, there seems to be a bug in the Advanced search, in that "Save Search Preferences" does not seem to do anything at all, so one cannot avoid searching the useless forums unless you specifically select the target forums every time you perform a search.
What would be an ideal solution to the issue is to allow a user to completely Ignore forums that are of no interest, just as one can Ignore users who are of no interest (unless a user has become any type of forum Moderator -several of whom should be Ignorable, IMHO).
So, the call to action is that I would be willing to pay to subscribe to the "Alliance" if the Search and New Search was improved to allow excluding the offal.
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"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." - Abraham Lincoln
What is garbage to you is the reason some people use the site. Off Topic is not going to go away.
Search has always been an issue. There is a new version of vBulletin, the forum software, that is soon to be released and we are scheduled for update. I'm sorry I don't have the time frame, this is a very complex site with a lot of customization that will take a good deal of testing. We expect the search to work better with the latest version.
I agree that the search is less than user-friendly.
However, it's a stretch to say that Off-Topic is a waste of space. It contains more than 500,000 posts - which I would venture to say is about a quarter of the total posts on NAM.
When searching, if you use the advanced search feature you *can* narrow your search down to selected parts of the forums.
But it is not possible to get the New since last visit posts without seeing all the forums. I have, for example, little interest in the contents of the 2nd-Gen cars, since I have a 1st gen.
It's a pretty bad search implementation - not very flexible.
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"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." - Abraham Lincoln
