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SPAM

SPAM will not be tolerated on Postforum. If you spam the site, your account will be banned, your IP address will be logged, and your internet and email providers will be notified with all of the information they need to track you down. This will typically result in termination of your internet access and email accounts through those providers. With luck, karma will ensure that you get hit by a bus next time you cross the street. Your message is usually deleted before it can reach a large audience anyway, so please just go away and bother someone else.

To Postforum users: If you see spam, please let me know and I will delete the message ASAP and initiate the actions outlined above. Please DO NOT reply to spam messages. It's extremely difficult for me to extricate the messages from the database once a thread has begun, and really, there's no point in responding - the spammers could care less. Just notify me with a link to the message and I'll get rid of it.

-perry

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Postforum Message Archive

Search

From here you can search the entire archive of messages posted on postforum.com from 1997 to 2001, there are about 200,000 messages, compressed into complete threads.

To search messages posted after 2000, use the search engines built into the forums. For most boards, all messages starting in 2001, and some messages dating back to early 2000 will be in the live boards. No more messages will be added to the archive, so for messages posted after 2000-2001, please search the live message boards. In the future, all messages will remain in the message boards.

The search engine program is currently in beta, so you may occasionally get server errors. if this happens, you just need to back up and refine your search. I'll install new versions of the engine as they're released, and these errors should disappear. I know it's a pain, but the new version is much nicer to the server in terms of memory usage, and is less likely to be killed during a large or complex search.

Not all forums are currently in the archive. there are approximately 40,000 messages that need to be compressed into threads, put in place, and indexed. I'll be doing these as i have free time. it's a very slow process...

Some Search Tips

The search engine accepts the operators "and," "or," and "not." An "and" search will generally result in fewer, more accurate results. It's also the default, so you don't have to specify the word "and" if you don't want to. For example, if you want to find all the messages about raytracing and reflection, and you're interested in Cinema 4D, your search would look like this:
"raytracing and reflection", with Cinema4D selected from the forum list.
--OR--
"raytracing reflection", with Cinema4D selected from the forum list.
The search engine makes use of a stemming algorithm. This means that if you search for "videotape", messages with both the word "video" and "videotape" will come up. This helps in some situations with words that are misspelled.
Results are ranked by relevancy, represented by the little bar graph to the left of each search result.
Because of the caching scheme implemented to make searching faster and to minimize bandwidth, you can only bookmark the first page of any search results page. Subsequent pages [using Previous and Next buttons] will bring up an error page if you bookmark them.