I keep trying to come up with a clear and easy and brief guide to searching Mudcat. We have so many search engines, plus a "supersearch" that doesn't work. Everybody goes to the Supersearch and fails, and then they give up. Don't give up. If you can't find something, you can always ask one of us moderators. That's our job.

But let me try to make a list of the various search tools we have, and explain what their purposes are. To search for almost anything, there are only two places to go:

1. The Filter - to find threads by thread name. It's that box at the top of the list of threads. Put one or two distinctive words or a partial word, set the age back to "all" or whatever, and "refresh." If you want to find all our threads on Tom Paxton, put Paxton in the Filter box. If you get too many results, use CTRL-F on your keyboard to refine your results.

2. Old Advanced Forum Search (click) (in the Quicklinks dropdown menu on almost every Mudcat Page)
   This is a collection of almost all the search utilities we've had at Mudcat over the years, and (most) of them still work.
   • Subject Search is my favorite, and it's right at the top. It searches for things by Message title.
     Since 1997, I have been constantly editing and standardizing message and thread titles to make the Filter and the Subject Search work better. If you're looking for a song, put one word or phrase from the song title in the "Subject" box and search.
     
   • UserName searches messages by the name of the person who posted them. Put Max in the search box and it will bring up all messages posted by people named Max.
     Hint: You can also click on the poster's name in any message, and it will conduct this same search and bring up all messages posted by that person. As with all searches, you can refine the results by using CTRL-F on your keyboard.

That's it, just two places to go to find almost everything. If you get a 500 - Internal server error, you can usually click past it by refreshing your page. But it doesn't work on the Lyrics & Knowledge Search - that search engine is broken.