Searching particular boards by page number or year

[Croneathome]

Hi there,
Sometimes I just want to browse a particular board with no specific query in mind, more like I’m interested to know what was being said on the board’s topic in a particular year, or I like the board and have read all recent posts that interest me and now want to randomly browse past posts. I haven’t found a way to do this really, except for starting at the very beginning and moving forwards page by page. I want a dip in and out function! Is this possible?

Hi there @Croneathome. We think we understand what you mean, but do let us know if we've got the wrong end of the stick.

So, one way to browse threads on a subject would be to do an advanced search. You can specify a topic and search for certain keywords. Appreciate that's not really 'random' but it would give you threads from a range of dates. Or you could also search just a selection of dates within a certain topic that way if you just wanted threads from, say, 2005 within one board.

Is that sort of what you mean?

Sort of: imagine I want to see all threads posted on "Gardening" in 2015, or I want to select a random page (for example, p. 450 on "The Dohouse"), how do I do that?

When you're using advanced search, the very last option lets you choose to only see results in particular topics. You can choose the desired topic and this should return the results you're looking for!

I see I haven´t explained myself very well: imagine I want to see all threads posted on the gardening board or on the doghouse board in a particular year, or I want to browse random pages on either of those boards, how would I do it? As far as I can see, the advanced search function doesn´t allow me to do either of those things because it´s based on using keywords.
Thanks for your help.

@Croneathome - go to Advanced Search. You don't need to enter a keyword - just leave that bit blank. But go to the dates section and in 'from' put 01/01/2015, and in 'to' put 31/12/2015, then choose the topic you're interested in underneath.

So I did this search and selected the gardening topic (as that was one you mentioned!) and this was the result:

https://www.mumsnet.com/search/advanced#/?type=all&from=2015-01-01&to=2015-12-31&topics=Gardening&page=1&sort=created_at%3Aasc

Is that what you were after?

YES! That’s it exactly! Thank you. I had tried this very strategy with the feminism board and hardly got any results, so assumed it didn’t work, but maybe that’s to do with renaming/splitting that particular board, or earlier lack of activity….