Thank you for posting this, FrickNFool. I was curious about the post that got 224 recs from the “Improve the Fool” message board, back in 2013. So I used the new Motley Fool board search tool, powered by Elastic, to dig up that post:
https://discussion.fool.com/the-once-and-future-index-tool-30939…
(Just kidding, I Googled it. Did I fool anybody?) Anyways, that post is…wait for it…a request for TMF to update their search capabilities. BUT…in that message is a link to a 3rd party webpage that allows certain Motley Fool boards to be searched:
http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml
This was completely new to me. For those of you (i.e., not me) who read the boards that this indexes (Mechanical Investing, Foolish Workshop, MI & FW boards, Market Screens, Mechanical Futures, Doc’s Guide, Radish’s Roughnecks, Benchmark Investing, Webmaster’s Corner, Berkshire Hathaway, Dynamic Value Investing), this looks like an incredibly useful link to have.
Apparently, this webpage was set up independently by the TMF member with username MarkW. His email and phone number are actually listed on the website.
It looks like this 2013 board posting was triggered by some one-time change in how TMF website indexed its pages, which affected the ability of the boards to be crawled [see the link at the bottom of that post]. However, it also seems like a workaround was found right away, because it’s still up-to-date today.
Now, is anybody else thinking the exact same thing that I was when I found this out? (You know what they say: “Great mind think alike”…as do you and I??) For those of you who are non-mindreaders, I immediately had the following thought, while trying not to spit my coffee over my laptop:
OMG, it would be INCREDIBLY useful if Saul’s board were to be added to this list! How can we make this happen??
Though I’m not tech illiterate, I’m also not a techie, and I have no idea if this would be a huge request to ask, or if it’s a just matter of writing a simple script or two. But I KNOW there are people on this board who can answer this question. Also, has anyone on here approached Mark about this? Given how many people read this board, and how MarkW is still active, it seems like a topic that would have would have been broached by now. He surely knows about this board, as it’s by far the most popular, in terms of Rec counts, and it does come up on the MI board, which is his most frequented. Or perhaps not; Saul’s board didn’t start until 2014.
I’d be happy to email and ask him, but before I do, I wanted to see (i) if someone else has already emailed him about it, (ii) whether it’s a tiny or a huge request, and (iii) offer Saul and the Assistant Board Managers the opportunity to send such an email if they’d prefer to initiate the that discussion.
Or, if this isn’t in the cards, for whatever reason, then maybe one the hundreds of people who are on this board will have the capability, time, and motivation to create something like this? Again, I don’t know if what I’m asking is a really simple task for someone with those skills, or if it’s unreasonable. But if it is on the simple side…are there any takers?