Searching for Discussions and Answers

The Search Function

There’s a lot of content on these forums, so you might want some assistance in finding specific discussions and/or answers. Which is why we have the Search function!

There are three main forms of the Search function, sitewide search, location search and advanced.

You can find the sitewide search on every page and  location search on board or index pages

Sitewide search

The sitewide search, as the name implies, checks the entire site. It can also be used to search for specific forum-goers or staff. 
To start this, click the Magnifying Glass icon to the top right of the page, then type what (or who) you’re looking for in the field that pops up. 

Location search

The location search can be started by clicking in the search bar in the middle or to the side of the main banner. This will populate threads from that location and its sub-board. 

 

Both of these will then populate with relevant Threads. The sitewide search will even show matching people and boards on the right hand side. If what you’re looking for is here, great! Click through to your intended destination.

Advanced search

However, if you want to refine things a bit more, you can press Enter to go to the more advanced search page.

Here you’ll see a more extensive list of search options, such as the ability to display by relevance, age, likes or views. There are also a bunch of filters you can apply to narrow down your search.

Post priority/Linear v Threaded

You can change how a Discussion displays its replies (Linear/Threaded/Community default) from your profile page.

Comments/replies in a discussion will be either by posting time or by Likes, and this can be selected on the profile page or in the discussion itself. 

You can change this in a Discussion by clicking the button just below the first post, which will show the current display style.

For general chats, folks may want to stick to the default of threading by Most Liked, to see the most compelling community posts.

For technical issues, it may be wise to view linearly by post time, to see how discussion of an issue grew. 
However this is your choice, be sure to experiment to see what works for you.

Filters

We encourage you to have a poke around the search and filter options to get comfortable with the search tool.

You can filter by:

• Use Last update to show only content updated in the last day, week, month or year.
• Whether the Replies have a Solution or not.
• Location, checking for a specific franchise or board.
• Check for the presence of a specific Author. 
• The Content Type, whether regular Forums, blogs, Ideas or Knowledge bases. You can also search by Tags.

How to find posts from EA Staff

You might notice folks here with names prefixed by EA_ and the Community Manager title. 

That’s us, the EA staff. 👋

While we generally can’t help with 1:1 account issues we’ll be here reading things, gathering info, keeping the boards safe and clean, and probing for information on potential emerging issues.
Because of this at times you might want to focus on threads which we open. Discussions we start will have the EA icon, so you can use that to find any updates we have on issues. If you see our EA Icon in on a discussion about an emerging issue we may have important updates too. 
We’ll often highlight important information by marking it as Solution too. 

You can also click on the staff member’s name to view their recent posts and solutions, which may also have useful updates for you