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late to reply - not wanting to repeat what tester said already.
but when I say "I can never remember" - it means exactly that. It means that however obvious it might be to you, and however many times I see it somewhere else in some discussion - I won't remember it. I have to look it up. There is a very useful post on the "how to search" thread where you list all of the ways to search, that I use as a reference when needed.
The "access to controls" I agree with tester - yes absolutely one can do everything and the built-in functionality is great - but I can't without it being cumbersome and non-intuitive. You talk about search as something that microcosm does - but to most users it's the box where that they use to look for something. It has the same name, but it comes across a bit... patronising? to say "Ah, search is actually not shit, of course, everything is search."
It's simply not true to say "when people get it they love it" - it's been a while, I'm not a complete luddite, I definitely don't want the old advanced search page, I can't even remember what it looked like. My brain doesn't seem to retain the things it needs to get this search box to do what I need it to. (This isn't meant to be a massive complaint from me - I don't need to use search much and if I do I can find that reference post etc - I'm just trying to explain how it is for a moderately average user.) Learning how to navigate the user profile page will make things much much easier for me in future - but that doesn't change the search box.
Two thoughts:
When you click on the magnifying glass and it takes you to a blank search page (https://www.lfgss.com/search/?q=&defaults=true) could you put a list of the most common search identifier things in that blank space on the page? Or a tiny help button that pops up with similar stuff from the home page. There isn't really a "start search page" at the moment, which would seem to be the obvious place for this stuff - if the magnifying glass looked more button-ish, the blank search result could do for this.
The most common thing people struggle to remember is authorId. On the search results page, grey menu on the right, could it be added to Filters as a 4th check box? Check it, and alongside have one of those dropdown things where it turns a name into a link/ID so you don't have to fetch the ID number.
Obviously I don't know how possible any of that is, but wondering whether those things can be added to existing pages/menus. The second one would make a huge difference I think.
(didn't mean for that to be quite so tl:dr)
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hoefla
That's me experimenting and tweaking... should be fine now, I've stopped tweaking.
The syntax is
authorId:47686Internally we use different different things in different places, i.e. I track
edited_byandcreated_by... but when searching you don't care, you just care about "bob posted x" and whether a moderator edited it to remove something (extremely rare, can't recall doing it in many moons) shouldn't exclude it from the search result.So the query reflects the ambiguity of what you're searching on, and calls it
authorId.