The problem with forum searches is that you can never find anything using them.  Well, no, the real problem with forum searches are the people who answer your posts with, “Please search the forum before posting a new message…”

Those people are usually the ones who spend way too much time reading forum posts.  Sure, if you read every post in the forum, you’d be able to find things using the search.  Why?  Because you’d know exactly what to search for!

I upgraded a piece of graphics software recently.  The first time I cropped a photo, only half of the photo appeared.  When I looked at it in the photo editor it looked fine.  Going back to the main page, only half the photo appeared.  So, I used a different piece of software and forgot about it.

The second time I cropped a photo, when I went back to the main page, the photo displayed only the portion I had saved with the crop, but it was the same size as the original photo.  It should have been smaller, you see.

So, I went to the support forum.  I thought about it for a while and couldn’t think of a way to search for this particular problem.  From my perspective, the software was messing up - losing part of an image and resizing photos all by itself.  How can you search for that??

I started a new thread and explained what was happening.  The response?  One of the dreaded “you should have done a search first”.  Turns out that the photo editor doesn’t really work any more.  So, one could ask, “Well, then, why is it still included in the software?”  But, no one addressed that issue.

I was lucky this time, though.  At least the person who responded included the URLs to the threads that addressed the issue.

So, the next time you read a forum post from some dummy who is asking a question that has been asked before, take pity.  Maybe you would know to search for “What has happend to the image cropper” or “XPE cropping”, but for those of us who don’t even know what XPE means?  Please just answer the question!