Forums field in Plant Identification Advanced Search

Please alphabetize all forums in the forum dropdown. Don't alphabetize them by group. With no visible headings it makes it an annoying hodgepodge. I dread having to search Plant Identification if the forum is important.

Thanks,
LAS

Are you referring to this page: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/advanced.php and the "groups"?

I think we're talking about this page: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/

This is what I'm talking about. Sorry, it looks like it's severely cropped, but I think you can probably figure it out. Here's the link.

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/search.php?q=sunflower&submit=+Search+forums+

Ahhh, okay. it's not just the Plant ID forum advanced search, it's the advanced search feature that works with all forums.

I'll see if we can change the navigation a bit, but here's the reasoning behind the way it works now. If you wanted to look for every thread with the word "sunflower" within the group of forums called "Plants" you can click on the group name and search ALL forums in that group. Or you can choose just a single forum to search within.

That's helpful if you're searching for - say, a particular recipe, and you aren't sure if you saw it in recipes, canning, or one of the other related forums...it lets you run one search instead of several. Ditto if you wanted to look for a plant for trade and wanted to look in all the trading forums because it might be in seed trading or international trading.

I don't understand how this addresses my request that the list of ALL be alphabetized.

TIA
LAS

Let me take another stab at it.

Let's say you are searching for a post made by "XYZ" member with the key word "rose."

You're pretty sure you saw it in one of the beginner forums, but you don't know which one. You have three choices:

1. Run a search on all forumss, which may turn up a lot of posts that you aren't looking for.
2. Run a search on each beginner forum, which can take quite a bit of time
3. Run a search on just the beginner forums.

The category titles you are seeing are grouping forums together. If you search on that category title, your search will be limited to all forums within that category.

If we removed the categories and alphabetized all the forums in the pulldown list, you wouldn't have that option available to you.


Instead of running a search on each forum, you can run a search against just those forums.

Oh! I see now that it is just categories. I'm pretty sure it hasn't always been that way. Once it was all forums, but grouped together without headings. So I'll restate my request. Could the dropdown in Advanced Search list all forums alphabetically, so one could pick a particular forum? The one called "General Discussions and Chat" just covers too many forums if you definitely want to look in, for instance, "Plant Identification."

Thanks for sticking with this til I understood.

LAS

No problem - and I will see if we can find a tweak to the navigation of that list to help address your request :-)

One hint/tip: if you click on any forum in the pulldown list to highlight it, then you can start typing the name of the forum and it will take you to it. You just have to spell it exactly as it appears...I usually type only the first few letters. If you stop typing because you made a mistake, you may have to hit your backspace to "clear" out the memory of what you typed.

Oh, wait. I was wrong in my last post. The dropdown DOES show all the forums, not just categories. Apparently my scroll bar was off the page. So I'm back to my original complaint. If I want to find "perennial" in the dropdown, I have to look through several alphabetized lists, but with no line or heading to show when new alphabetized groups begin.

If I wanted to type in the forum name, where would I do that? I don't see a field for it.

Thanks again for your attention.

LAS

This message was edited May 5, 2013 9:00 AM

Once you use your mouse to "anchor" (highlight) any forum, start typing the name of the forum you're looking for. No box will appear.