[fmichael]

I've gone back a couple of years in this forum and the issues doesn't appear to have been raised before. Forgive me if this ground has already been covered, but here goes:

A week ago, someone contacted me, hoping that I had the backup information on a long post of mine from a few years back, which we both remembered, but neither of us could find using the search function, which was odd.

Then today I was looking for information on a member, whose profile indicated that s/he last posted in March, 2008, but when I ran a name search it came up with exactly 500 hits, ending in November, 2007. So then, I tried the same thing on myself, and it gave me (with the exception of today's activity) my most recent 500 posts. And yet I only used the default date parameters in both cases. (I think.)

So, where I'm about to crack 1,000 posts on NT, does this mean that the first 500 are essentially lost? (And if I was to manifest in my OCD avatar, would I be stymied in an attempt to check out Jo's 12,890 posts for consistency?)

Seriously, the data is still there, because the threads are clearly preserved. But what really concerns me is that when I searched under my name and a couple of key words that had to have been used on a post on spinal cord stimulation - unrestricted as to forum - nothing came up. Almost as though the search routine was only looking for matches among a restricted amount of posts where the name of a forum member was itself a search constraint. And if that's the case, it really should be corrected.

And then why would one person's 500 post allocation start with the present and go back in time, while it appears to be possible to access only the initial 500 posts of someone else?

Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks.

Mike