Forum Etiquette And Efficient Usage

Hi all

1) In threads with dozens of pages, like the topical forum, how is the proper way to participate? To go over 40 or 60 pages before daring to add another stamp scan?

2) In the threads of "the stamps of this and this country", what is the best way to find a stamp you're interested to know about? Sometimes the stamps are not presented in chronological order, and sometimes it is not clear what is the right way to manage the search.
It's a huge amount of knowledge that I'm yet to find a good way to reach.

Don't understand your point of discussion here ,are you asking about searching on the chat board for something or are you asking about forum etiquette ? Your title is confusing .

I ask both:
What is the polite way when you want to add something and are not sure if it hadn't been posted yet, and in the "stamps of a country" thread, what is the best/right way to use them?

1. Your first point is very recognisable. There are issues posted more than once in those thematic threads. Going through all the pages in some of the bigger threads takes up a lot of time. If you want to post more than one item, you may even lose track of which have been posted and which have not by the time you have gone through the whole thread.

2. I understand people put a lot of time and effort in maintaining the site. Still, I am not 'very impressed' by the site's search functions. The general one returns a limited number of hits. If there is a long thread with many posts, you may find the same thread several times and the one you look for maybe ignored because it won't make the first 10 pages. The search field at the top of individual forums has its issues as well. It returns a lot of irrelevant posts. If someone has an autograph saying he collects Ireland and you search for Ireland, you may get posts from that person on Botswana.
I try to use thread titles with the issuing entity's name both as they appear on the stamp and in English. (This is an issue with the UK, as that is the entity, but collectors call it Great Britain) and nothing appears on the stamps, not even on those for the countries. Keeping to a chronological order requires planning. For permanent series, I try to keep threads limited to a single series.
Not long ago, someone made a typo and put 'neverland' rather than 'nederland' in the title.
There are separate forums for USA, Canada, Australia, and - someone got his favourite in - Switzerland, but huge areas such as France, Germany. UK, and even Spain with their colonies are all swept into the worldwide forums. Again,I understand people do their best, but it is rather messy if you collect some of the 90% of all stamps around issued by other countries.
I, once, suggested to add a box to enter a territory or subject. The argument for not doing it was that the many thousands existing threads would require too much updating. However, with the searches appearing to favour the most recent posts, I would suggest using the box for the new threads.

Still, if you are looking for a specific issue, you might ask for information and someone may be able to post a link to a relevant thread or resource.

In the SCF search page and using the Google search box...
type

Hamburg intitle:Germany

And it will return threads with Hamburg in the posts and Germany in the title

To search the Train topical pages to see if an image of a steam train has already been posted...
type

steam intitle:Trains

Then click on 'images' tab to view just the stamp images.

NOTE: these are text searches. So if someone is lazy and only posts a train stamp image without describing what the stamp is, this search will not find it.

If you already have the stamp you wish to upload, you can also use the Google Image search page to see if it has already been uploaded.

Go to Google Image search page
https://images.google.com/

The type
trains site: stampcommunity.org

This will return 'train' images only on the SCF site
Don

Thanks for the input NSK.
As for the country-specific threads, I better ask the originators of those threads how would they suggest to best utilize all the info there. After all, they planned the threads.

Don, thanks, I will try to use your advises.

I never noticed the image search in the google search. Thanks!