Why does the search feature default to displaying results as threads?

[Hitei]

Something that's always confused me about this forum's search interface is that, rather than returning a post that meets your search criteria (even when "posts" is selected as the type) it instead returns the entire thread in which your post is contained. Unless you specifically go into search single content type and flip it over to showing the results as posts.





This is kind of a huge pain. The thread version is sort of completely useless, particularly when you consider that the "post" version also tells you what thread the post is in:



The thread results are especially bad if you are trying to find an old post in a larger thread, like for instance, the 8.0 speculation thread. Effectively you just get told that the post you are searching for is somewhere within this thread of twelve thousand posts.

Can this be flipped to make the post version default so people don't have to go in and manually change it every time they search? It seems like the much more logical default state. It's made even worse by the fact that, though there is a "Save search preferences" option at the bottom of the advanced search--the regular search bar itself at the top of the MMOC page defaults to "Search Multiple Content Types" (SMCT). Which would be fine, except that SMCT does not have the option to show results as "posts" so anytime you use the regular search bar to look for something it always returns threads.



tl;dr I just think it would be a lot more useful if searching it returned posts by default instead of threads.

Just my $0.02.

[chaud]

Done. We'll see if anyone has a compelling reason to change it back.

[Hitei]

Done. We'll see if anyone has a compelling reason to change it back.

Awesome. Thanks!

[callipygoustp]

Awesome. Thanks!

Ditto. This is something that has driven me nuts when searching for something in a multi-page thread.