Advice for newbies

[Dave Monroe]

Those who know, know ...

--- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> the list has more than its fair share of trolling
> and sock puppetry. And cranks.

But I maintain that the archives are an underutilized
trasure trove for casual readers, students, academics,
et al.  The only problem is ...

> The "Keyword" search engine for the archives, once
> you get the hang of it, is probably the best way to
> find specific info.

... that you can only use one word, not even boolean
opeartors and/or quote-enclosed phrases, and just
because a word was actually used in a post, DOESN'T
mean the search function will find it.  Dammit, I
found two examples yesterday alone, but ...

But one problem is, certain keywords are used over and
over and over (and over ...) again.  My suggestion is,
if you ever want to find a post of yrs again, or want
it to be easily locatable (me, I can't say I've ever
siad anything all too important or illuminating here,
but I HAVE ented an awful lot of annotations and
excerpts from critical commentaries, and it's very
convenient for me, at any rate, to be able to call
those up here, online, rather than dig out the source
mat'l) is to slip in a more unusual word along with
it.  Hell, I can find my own posts as often as not
simply by my characteristic typos (damn these
thalidomide flippers ...), so ...

> The "Search by author" and "Search by thread"
> functions on thmonth-by-month lists also allow you
> to avoid a lot of the cruft.

But I disgree there.  Unless you can recall subject
headings (which may or may not have to do with what
you might be looking for in a given post) or who wrote
something AND, at least roughly, when, it's even more
of a hard target search through myriad results ...

But another tried and true method here, as we've seen
even today, is, quite simply, ask.  Me, I'm always
happy to track down something given the time, and
there's no end of Those who Know (or at least put up a
good front) here, so ...

There's also this thing called the Infonet (?), but
... well, it won't search the archives, so ...

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