Searching WoW forums

[mikekdn]

While attempting to use the poorly designed search interface that was given to us on the battle.net forums, I stumbled upon:

PLEASE improve Battle.net forum search - Forums - World of Warcraft

and

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/1123259

I find this guide to be extremely useful and would like to share with the rest of the mmowned community! This is probably especially useful for searching the guild recruitment forum to find people who match your raid times and days.

To search within a forum, simply include the forumId field in the query string.

forumId:1025939 search

Forum ID list:
<US>
Customer Support 1011699
Service Status 1011700
Technical Support 1011701
Mac Technical Support 1011702
Bug Report 1012660
General Discussion 984270
Oceanic General Discussion 1011641
Guild Recruitment 1011639
Story Forum 1011638
Raid and Guild Leadership 2187372
World's End Tavern 1011637
New Player Help and Guides 1011644
Quests 1011692
Professions 1011647
Dungeons and Raids 1011645
Achievements and Guild Advancement 1011646
UI and Macro 1011693
Arenas 1011696
Battlegrounds 1011697
Damage Dealing 1033924
Healing 1033925
Tanking 1033926

...and the many class & realm forums which you can get the id simply by getting the numbers at the end of the url either by mousing over the link or visiting it. This can be done the same for EU forums as well.


The following example shows a query of documents created in the last two weeks.

createdAt:[NOW-14DAY/DAY TO NOW/DAY+1DAY]

For now, you have to do a chain of author:name queries for the blue posters you are looking for, which is kind of ugly. I'm looking at ways of improving this.

(author:Straton OR author:Lylirra)

You can either use the author:xxx field to search for posts or use the link provided next to a poster's name that says "show posts". Once you are on that search result page then just add whatever it is you want to search for to the search field.

author:Straton search

You can exclude types or terms by using a minus sign in the query.

Consider this search for the term mace.

mace


And then an alternative that includes all types except for forum posts.

mace AND -(typeost)