Feature Request: Search Thread OR Show All

A game I'm involved in involves a whole ton of names of places and species and people. Every so often a name comes up which I know I've heard before, but can't remember where. The problem is, the thread for this game is now 90 pages long, and if I want to go searching through it, I have to click to each individual page to find what I'm looking for (or if I now it's on page 45, I can't jump directly there, either!)

My request is either a search bar for a thread or maybe some sort of drop-down menu for how many posts to show per page (10, 20, 50, 100, ALL, something like that).

I'm not a coding person, so I don't know if that's do-able. Are there any ways to work around this so one doesn't spend an hour searching through previous pages?

People have used Google's site search (which lets you search within a particular website) to do this in the past; hopefully someone that remembers the format notices this thread or I can figure it out, so at least you'll have something for now.

As for the site part, I do intend on making a more through search feature, as soon as I can figure out how to do it without bogging the site down. As for posts per page, that's an idea I can get behind. Based on how it's currently structured, that may not be immediately viable, but as I'm currently refactoring the entire site, I can do it then.

I feel it's one of those things which falls in the categories of responsibilities of the GM. If you know the game you'll run will have a huge cast a characters and many different locations, then you might want to make a thread especially to list them as the PCs meet/discover them. Or maybe do what I did in my Pathfinder Ravenloft campaign and make a thread for the purpose of players taking notes for these sorts of things...

But hey, a nice tool is a nice tool is a nice tool, and a search function certainly cannot hurt to have...

Hey, Keleth, no pressure or anything, but I'm just wondering if this is still on your back burner? Do you have any updates regarding this feature?

Thanks. :)

I haven't yet had a chance to learn more about efficient searching mechanisms, or a new tool like Elasticsearch.

FYI, the Google search format is:

site:gamersplane.com search_pattern

I think you can also restrict it to the forum by appending the directory structure in the URL:

site:gamersplane.com/forums/thread/thread_number/* search_pattern

In either case, the forum may need to be set Public in order for Google to search through it. I've not gotten results from Private games.

Yeah, unfortunately it doesn't work for private games, and that's just what I'm hoping for (eventually) :)