You can now choose whether to search within posts only, or within both posts and replies. When you click in the search box, a small popup will appear that lets you select the option you want. The default selection is to search just the posts, which I think tends to give more accurate results. For those of you who still prefer to search the old-school way, the second option is available.

We’ve changed the way search tries to match word variations, which was resulting in things like a search for “busy” incorrectly matching the word “business”.  We’ve also changed some settings with the search indexer so that posts get processed more quickly and will show up in the search results sooner. We hope these changes make search suck just a little bit less than it did before, please let us know if you have any comments!

Starting today, when you post links to Amazon.com products that you are recommending to other users, our affiliate code will automatically be inserted into the link. If that link is clicked and a purchase is made on Amazon, we’ll get a small commission for referring the sale.

We like the fact that this change doesn’t require any user intervention, and should have no effect on the user experience. No hanging browsers, no annoying pop-ups, no vomit-inducing hamburger ads!

If you have any comments or feedback please let us know, and thank you for your support!

EDIT 1: To clarify some questions about how this works:

• You don’t need to do anything with the links you’re posting from Amazon.com. When you submit the post, the link will be formatted automatically.
• If someone posts a link on YBM to an Amazon product and you click on that link and make a purchase, Amazon will take care of the rest. You don’t have to enter a special promotional code or do anything else.
• You do not end up paying more for your product by clicking through to Amazon from YBM. The price you pay would be the same if you went directly to Amazon.com and searched for the product yourself.

EDIT 2: By request, we’ve added a direct link to Amazon.com in the sidebar.

Visitor Counter: The visitor counter, located towards the upper right corner of the forum, gives you a rough idea of how many people are on the site.

Most Discussed Posts: The Most Discussed Posts page highlights recent threads that have sparked the most discussion.

Most Liked Posts/Like a Post: You can vote for your favorite posts by liking a post. Posts with the most likes are collected on the Most Liked Posts page.

Site Search: We’ve added advanced search options like exact phrase matching, excluding a term, and matching any term. We’ve also added word stemming support, which is just a fancy way of saying searches will try to match all variations on the root of the search term (i.e.  a search for diet will match the words diet, diets, dieting, dieted, and dieter).

Post Formatting: We’ve added the ability to bold and italicize the text in your posts using BBCode tags.

Video Embedding: You can embed YouTube videos directly into posts so they can be viewed without having to leave the site.

Permalink Sharing: The permalink pages have a sharing toolbar to make it easier to email, print, and share links on Facebook or Twitter.

Post Flagging/Filtering: We’ve added a basic flagging system to help moderate the site.  You also have the option to automatically hide posts that have been flagged too many times.

You can find a more detailed explanation for many of these new features in our FAQ.  We hope you enjoy the updates and look forward to hearing what you think.

1. All of the 40 million+ posts that have been collected since the site’s launch are finally searchable.
2. Search results now include matches on word variations. For example searches for clean will match clean, cleaning and cleaned.
3. Searches for exact phrases can be performed by enclosing your search terms in double quotes.  For example, searching “capri pants” will find all threads which contain the exact phrase capri pants, but will not return threads that mention the words capri and pants in different parts of the thread.
4. You can OR search terms by separating your words with a vertical bar(|). For example, searching for pasta | grain will return all threads which contain either the word pasta or grain.
5. You can exclude search terms by using the NOT(!) operator. For example, searching for jeans !jeggings will return threads which contain the word jeans and do not contain the word jeggings.

Users who are flagged too many times over a period of time will automatically be put in a time-out for 30 minutes. During this time you will not be able to post, reply, or register new accounts. If you are flagged too many times again after your first time-out, you’ll be put in another time-out for 7 days. If you are flagged too many times yet again, you are in your third time-out and will probably be in it for a long long time. Like really long.

We’ve tried really hard to let the site continue under a strict no-moderation policy. During this time, we’ve received many requests to delete posts, ban users, and generally lay the smack down on abusive posters. Given that we’re not available 24 hours a day, it’s impossible for us to respond in a timely manner to all requests. Even if we could, it would be difficult being the sole moderators on a site where many of the taboo subjects tread a grey line between appropriate and offensive.

We all come here for different reasons. Whether it’s to get help, share information, socialize, or be entertained, we hope you will continue to get the same enjoyment/stress/misery from YBM, less some blatant idiotic trolling and spamming.

As with everything else in the beta release, we look forward to hearing your feedback.

*dons purple flame suit*

1. liking both posts and replies
2. being able to unlike and unflag posts you’ve accidentally clicked
3. removing the fixed minimum width on the forum

We’re still working on several other fixes.  Please keep the feedback coming, we really appreciate it!

UPDATE: Logged in users should now be defaulting to their My Boards view.

In the meantime, there are a few outstanding bugs we’re in the process of squashing.  If you’ve identified other problems with the release, or just have a comment in general, please let us know. Thanks!

1. View is defaulting to All Boards instead of My Boards *fixed*
2. Unable to clear post history *fixed*
3. Unable to retrieve or change password *fixed*
4. Subject getting cut off when post spills over into the message box *fixed? anyone?*

We’ve tried really hard to keep the primary function of the forum the same, so that those of you who just want to keep doing what you do will be able to. But we’ve also tried to take into account a lot of the comments we’ve heard over the months. Remember, this is a beta test. It’s not perfect, and it’s not final. Most of the ideas for this release come from the community, and we value your feedback.  Some of the major changes include:

Visitor Counter: Users have been requesting this for about as long as the site has been around, and we’re glad to finally release it for everyone. The counter measures how many visitors are currently looking at the site. This includes users who are logged in and actively posting as well as anonymous users who are just reading through the forum.

iPhone and iPad Support: The beta site will be much friendlier to users on iPhones or iPads.  Some things had to be sacrificed (mainly the fixed refresh/new post bars at the top and bottom), but hopefully the improved user experience makes up for it. We haven’t been able to test this on other mobile devices, so we’d love to hear from you if you’re trying this out on something other than an iPhone or iPad.

Most Discussed Posts: Most of us can’t be here 24 hours a day to read every single thread that gets posted. In an effort to surface some of the more interesting/controversial/entertaining posts that we miss, we put together a list of  Most Discussed Posts.  You can browse these by the last day, week, or month.

Like a Post: Similarly, many of us like to re-post threads we enjoyed and share them with others. The like feature is meant to help “vote up” threads that we find of value (whatever that means to you). We’ll put up a Most Liked Posts list soon that will update over time, so you can catch up on  all the great posts that you missed while you were away.

Flag a Post: While posting in anonymity is great for encouraging open discussion, we’ve all seen the uglier side effects of such freedom. The subject of moderation deserves a completely separate post but in short, post flagging is an attempt to let the community moderate itself without giving any one individual the responsibility of deciding what stays and what goes.

Each user will be able to flag a post once. At its default setting, any post that has been flagged more than 3 times will be automatically hidden. In your settings you can set this number higher or lower, or disable auto-hiding completely.

Flagging is intended to reduce some of the blatantly abusive repeater posting, spamming and trolling on the site, and is not meant to be used just because you have a difference of opinion about a topic. We did consider the idea of a vote down/dislike type feature, but seeing as how this group can’t even agree on whether couscous is a grain or a pasta, we felt there was a good chance that pretty much every single post would end up getting voted down.

Advanced Search: We’ve added some additional search options so that you can search for exact phrases, posts with all of your keywords, posts with one or more of your keywords,  and more. We’ve also upgraded the search highlighting to do a better job of picking up all terms, as well as automatically expanding a post if the search term appears in the message part.

Permalink Sharing: On every permalink page, we’ve added shortcuts to share a permalink on Facebook, post it to your Twitter account, or email it to a friend.

Printer-Friendly Permalink Pages: If you’ve ever tried to print out a permalink page, you know it looks like crap. There is now a print shortcut along with a cleaned up version of the page for easier reading.

In addition, there are several smaller changes. Many users were accidentally posting their usernames and passwords because they thought they were logging in and not creating a post. We’ve gotten rid of that login at the bottom to make this clearer.  The ‘Unsticky All’ link has been moved to the right now to make it harder for users to unintentionally unsticky all their posts.  Because of potential confusion about what timezone is being displayed, we modified the date/time format for posts that are less than 1 day old to instead show how much time has passed.