# Search tips for finding stories



## Tad

There are so many stories in the Dimensions library that it can be hard to find anything in particular. 

Here are a couple of tips for how to use the *Advanced Search feature* to help your search. 
(this is pretty basic; others may have more advanced tips to add).

Of course, you need to know how to get to Advanced Search in order to use any of this! 

To get to Advance Search, first click on “Search” in the menu bar near the top of the page. A small window will come up, and in you will see “Advanced Search” at the bottom. Click on that and you will get taken to a new window.

First up: search by author. 

Say that you want to find all of the stories written by Samster. There isn’t really an option for that, but what you can do is look for all of the threads that Samster has started within the library, and this will probably catch all of his stories (plus maybe a couple of extra threads).
1.	In the upper-right pain, where is says “user name” type in his name (don’t hit &#8216;enter’ when you are done)
2.	Wait a second or two, then a list of all matching names comes up. If you typed &#8216;Samster’ there is only one match right now, but if you only bothered to type in &#8216;Sams’ you’ll get a longer list. (if you only typed in &#8216;Sam’ you’ll only see so many of all the matches, and &#8216;Samster’ isn’t even on that list)
3.	Click on the correct name.
4.	Still in that same pane, you’ll see where it says “All posts by user” with a drop down arrow beside it. Click on the arrow, and instead choose “all threads started by user.”
5.	Go to the bottom-right pane in the search window, called &#8216;search in forum(s)’ Scroll down and select “Library” (that will search the entire Library—you don’t have to click all of the sub-boards. If you only want to search certain sub-boards, you could click those instead)
6.	In the bottom left pane of the search window, labeled “show results as” make sure that “Threads” is chosen (this should be the default).
7.	Hit “Search Now” at the bottom of the search window, and your results should come up.

Second, to search by the flags set in the titles. 

You may have noticed these, where after the title is says things like SSBBW or ~BHM or ~~WG. You might have wondered what the deal is with those &#8216;~’ characters in front. The reason for those is that the search feature demands at least four characters in a search term; it won’t even run a search for &#8216;BHM.’ This search is easy. Let’s say you want to search for stories about BHM.

1.	Make sure that you have cleared the screen from any previous search 
2.	The upper left pane of the search window is marked as &#8216;search by keyword.’ In there enter the search term you are looking for—in this case “~BHM”
3.	Just below that, it will say “Search entire posts” with a drop down arrow beside it. Click on the arrow, and instead choose “Search Titles Only”
4.	Go to the bottom-right pane in the search window, called &#8216;search in forum(s)’ Scroll down and select “Library” (that will search the entire Library—you don’t have to click all of the sub-boards. If you only want to search certain sub-boards, you could click those instead)
5.	Hit the “Search Now” button at the bottom of the search window.
6.	This one currently returns 329 hits, so there is still a lot of results to go through. You can look at the search window and there are additional options, such as when stuff was posted, how many replies to the original post there have been, etc.


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