searching capabilities

[Anonymous]

Jeff:

I just posted this question on the Expectant Moms forum and realized that I should probably post it here as well. There's a current thread that among other things, addresses the fact that while DCUM is another otherwise FABULOUS resource, the searching capabilties are sub par. Are there any plans on the horizon to improve this? My thought was that it would be great if we could tag our posts--that way there is a more or less agreed upon vocabularly that can be searched under (obviuosly it would take some time for the tag list to grow to be really effective). As I mentioned in my other post, I have absolutely no idea how difficult this would be to implement, but I just wanted to throw it out there. Thanks for all of your hard work!

[jsteele]

I answered your other post while you were typing this one. However, I'll post my reply here as well:

The forums are based on an open source program (jforum) which is maintained by volunteers. As such, I'm dependent on them for new features in the software. I'm maintaining a list of features that I'd like to see added. The idea of "tagging" threads is not one that I had thought of, but is a pretty good idea. I'll add it to my list. However, I'm afraid that the difference between adding to my list and forgetting about it completely is pretty small at this point. Maybe one day we will have funds available to hire our own programmers, but not at the moment.

In the meantime, you might have better search results using Google rather than our own search engine. Just include "site:www.dcurbanmom.com search_term" in the Google search. Replace "search_term" with the word or words for which you want to search.