Is there a proper place in this “discussion forum” for announcements of resources, e.g. the long list of posts recently by musiko. Are they meant as topics of discussion, or what?
Sure, this was one of the purposes of setting up the forum in the first place. I realize it’s a little awkward, as different things are being combined together, but it means someone looking for material on the suttas can find it easily with search.
Sounds useful.
How could one, then, search for a talk by a specific teacher on a specific topic? Or all talks across teachers on a topic?
Searching from the gizmo at the top-right on, say, “sujato talk metta” yields a lot of places where the words happen to appear in misc. posts. Google search seems to do better finding youtube recorded talks.
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Search tool can be refined with ‘options’ in the bottom right corner of the tool window which opens advanced search.
A query similar to this
metta tags:sujato+audio-optimized #av
or this
DN 16 #av tags:audio-optimized
will list all talks from this series in the AV category which have Bhante Sujato as author and metta as keyword or those which have SC ID for Sutta 16 of the Digha Nikaya mentioned in the post respectively. Search term can be either entered by hand or built by selecting appropriate checkboxes and fields in the advanced search tool.
This will not be 100% accurate since not all posts consist of single author, but it should be close enough.
There are also links like these at the bottom of the posts:
which are predefined search links like those mentioned above and can be further refined as needed in the advanced search once clicked on.
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Where do I find description of the syntax structure for such queries?
And a list and definitions of the “tags”?
The scheme looks overly geeky.
Some data—like # for category or tags: for tags—is site specific and is best learned from examples (I don’t think there is a definition list available, since this data is mostly dynamic, but you will see tags under the title of each post).
I believe there are some guidelines regarding the use of tags somewhere on this forum (author should be a single word, usually surname or in case of sangha just a name without honorifics), but since buddhism is a dis-organised religion this is somewhat reflected in usage of tags—different users seem to use different approaches.
I use specific tag audio-optimized for audio talks that are encoded in 16kbps 11kHz Mono mp3 format, which gives the best ratio between quality and size for speech and suffers almost no loss in quality from original recording regardless of bitrate (providing original quality is good).
Others I use mostly for author (sujato, brahmali, analayo, ajahnbrahm…), location (bswa, santifm) and category (sutta, agama, bhikkhuni, workshop, meditation, retreat, vinaya…). At the end of a post there is also a search link that provides easy location of similar resources.
Tags can be combined using this approach with only two options: using , between tags stands for OR while + stands for AND but there is no option to exclude or combine search terms. For this one can use well known search engines with site:https://discourse.suttacentral.net/ added to advanced search syntax like this:
D&D Advanced Search:
#av tags:audio-optimized+workshop+sujato
Other popular search engines:
-brahmali #av tags:audio-optimized+workshop+sujato site:https://discourse.suttacentral.net/
-kammarebirth #av tags:audio-optimized+workshop+sujato site:https://discourse.suttacentral.net/
-kammarebirth +brahmali #av tags:audio-optimized+workshop+sujato site:https://discourse.suttacentral.net/
The search box with this syntax will even present itself at the bottom of advanced search in case the search result is empty 