ian

This is the second attempt at a change in just over a month. If I am only interested in the postings in Italy how can I find them without having to wade through all of Europe - Europe as a whole may only have 10-20 % postings on Italy on the first 50 and additionally from the subject title it is not always possible to comprehend which country the message is referring to. <BR>Can we have our old system back again or are certain people like the bureaucrats in Brussels changing for changing's sake?

nancy

ian, <BR>Have you posted your complaints in the Grab Bag section?<BR>Fodor site has posted a thread asking for input, so that is one thread they will be sure of paying attention to.<BR>

s.fowler

Well Italy is a big topic, but you might do a search for, say Florence. Then you can rank them by date to see what's new and by most active. This is actually an improvement IMHO.

Rex

I am not aware at any attempt at change earlier in the past month.<BR><BR>You can search italy , though I did encounter a timeout error the first time I tried it. There are 791 threads retrieved by searching Italy with a post date since March 1, and another 768 (total = 1559) from January 1 forward.<BR><BR>There IS such a sharp fall-off before Jan 1, that I wonder if "country tagging" is fully implementing - - or some other aspect of the search function performing strangely for older posts. <BR><BR>Still, there is no shortage of older posts retrieved by searching Italy. Jan 1 of 2000 takes you back 2940 posts deep. Once again, the fall-off in 1999 posts seems sharp to me, but maybe there really are "pcokets" in time, when the number of "untopped" posts falls way off.<BR><BR>For a while yesterday, I thought that the database had been culled, but I no longer believe that this is true.<BR><BR>Best wishes,<BR><BR>Rex<BR>

Diane

Oh my goodness, Rex, did you really miss it? It divided Europe up into multiple/separate forums, same for the US...Hawaii and Disney had their own sections. Folks got quite upset. Personally I thought it was OK, but many really hated it.

Rex

If you're talking about the "split-up in September or October, Diane - - well, of course, I did not miss that (though I was in Europe for part of it). I was one of the most vocal protesters at the time.<BR><BR>But "ian" said "in just over a month".<BR>

Triple-O

i just did a search for "Italy" and got hundreds of threads. sorting by date, i got 250 threads that had had responses within the past week. what is the problem with this? seems absolutely fine to me.<BR><BR>ooo

ian

Maybe it was more like three months ago but the reasoning remains the same. I am interested in all postings not on "Italy" but relating to the country. Searching using "Italy" basically returns those with the word Italy/italian etc in the title or text. <BR>Often I believe one's travels plans are improved or amended due to seeing that chance posting under the country section which with the new system is very hard to pick up.

Sheila

Actually, Ian, it doesn't. if I search, Scotland, for example, the very first response does not have Scotland in the title; neither does the third etc.<BR><BR>I doen't understand the technology well, but this works better for me than when I had to add a country. I have to say that if I were doing the search I was last month when I was looking for something I'd done before about golf, the benefit of looking for "golf" in "Scotland" was great. But that search failed ......

Ann

The problem I think with the old system was that it depended on people choosing the correct country for their posting, or even any country. So you were probably missing relevant postings without realising. I have managed to find postings with the new system which I had thought lost and gone for ever.