# How do I find older threads?



## CMF (May 1, 2008)

I was trying to find some of the threads I started when I first started posting on TUG and it seems like the list is cut off at the last 400.  How do I see all of my posts?

Charles


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## Keitht (May 1, 2008)

If you used the Advanced Search option from Search you can look for items over a certain age.  That might help.


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## CMF (May 2, 2008)

I selected the options for posts that are a year or more older.  I pulled post dating from November 2005 but nothing older.

Charles


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## Makai Guy (May 2, 2008)

The search was set to limit responses to 400 returns, to limit the load searches place on the server.   This is the default setting.  Since we are on our own dedicated server that runs nothing but TUG, I've upped this to 1000 on a trial basis.   If we start having server bog down problems, we'll move the setting back.


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## CMF (May 2, 2008)

I now get 682 hits when I search for all my threads and the earliest is still in November 2005.  

In particular, I want to re-read the thread that I started when I was ready to by a Grand Chateau 3 bedroom for $33K. 

Charles


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## Keitht (May 2, 2008)

CMF said:


> I now get 682 hits when I search for all my threads and the earliest is still in November 2005.
> 
> Charles



My guess is that Nov 2005 is a cut off point for archiving, or deleting, old messages.  Most of us won't want to go back that far.  In fact most of us probably can't remember that far back. :rofl:


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## Dave M (May 3, 2008)

Charles -

There are other ways to search than just all of your posts. For example, you could search for your posts that include the word "chateau" or some other term that you believe the thread contained. I don't find and thread where you used the word "chateau" as far back as 2005.

It's likely that Keith's guess is correct. When we first moved to this new software in mid-2005, the server we had necessitated that we prune threads periodically, particularly in the most active forums, such as the Marriott forum. Thus, many of the threads for the period you seek were long ago been forever deleted.


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## Makai Guy (May 3, 2008)

We switched the bbs to vBulletin software 5 June 2005, hosted on a new account on a different server.  We thought this would eliminate our need to purge the message base for the forseeable future.  Our message base started over from scratch at that point because there was no way to carry over the messages from our previous board due to incompatibilities between the two systems.

But this server limited our _database_ to only 100 mb, even though we had several gb of total disk space available.  This necessitated continuing the pruning of forums just as we had to do with our former software and server, although we were able to maintain far more messages than on the previous system.  

In addition there was a serious error that occurred in roughly August '05 in which all messages that were then in TUG Lounge were mysteriously wiped out.  We still don't know how this happened.

We then acquired our own dedicated server hosted by Liquid Web, which we moved the bbs to on July 24, 2006.  We were able to retain all existing messages through this move.  We have a tremendous amount of disk space here, and we are still several years away from having to worry about running out of disk space.  With the exception of some time dependent posts (like LMR offers), and some of the spam posts, nothing has been purged from the board since we went to the new server in late July '06.


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