Prior to the recent forum change over, we were able to search the forums for posts by select words, and by user name. However, Williamsn, one of the site admins for Renderosity has stated in recent thread : " This was an executive decision made by the admin team. Only admins, moderators, and coordinators can search by author. You can, however, search through all of YOUR posts by going to "my stats" and clicking on "view user's posts"." He also stated in another thread : "Disallowing search by username was NOT a matter of paranoia. It was based on the fact that when the old forums had a search, users really WERE hunting down other users and harassing them. It became a serious problem that partially led to the decision to turn the search off altogether. Remember that, while ten or twenty users being harassed isn't that many in 30,000 forum users, it IS a big deal when you have a much SMALLER number of moderators to deal with the problem. And we have less time to spend monitoring other areas of the forums when we spend so much time policing harassment. This was not my decision. Ultimately, I agree with and stand by the decision that was handed down to me, but it was not my decision to make. Originally, the new search allowed searching by username, but it was decided that it was best left a mod/coord/admin feature only." In that same thread, he added for clarification: "No, no, no, i'm NOT saying it was closed BECAUSE of the harassment. I'm saying that, from what I was told, that contributed to the decision. But the MAIN reason, yes, was bandwidth. It was slowing things down tremendously." *********************************************************** When I search for something in a forum I depend on certain things to help me find what I'm looking for: 1. Thread Name; (*Has been fixed and is waiting to be added) 2. Remembering approximate time period the thread was created; 3. User Name; 4. Key words from the thread subject title or remembering something posted within the thread itself. The purpose of this thread is to poll the forum members, the ones who depend on the search function, as to how they feel about the ability of being able to search by user names other than your own. Please, keep it civil. State your point without flames.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi