The Dog Food Project: How to locate information

Structure of Product Displays
Threads are titled by product line, sometimes with the manufacturer's name added in parentheses for clarification. If a manufacturer has several product lines with many different varieties, each one appears in a separate thread.

Forum Sorting Function
By default, forum entries are displayed by date, with the most recently active thread at the top. You may change the order to alphabetical display by simply clicking on "Subject" in the table header, a small arrow will indicate whether the display ascending or descending. It is also possible to sort by any other table header.

Search Function
Use the Search option if you are looking for a particular manufacturer, product, ingredient, attribute etc. - make sure you select the "Dry Food" forum in the left hand menu and type in the desired keyword(s).

If you are searching for a phrase that includes more than one word, make sure to put it between quotes, e.g. search for "chicken liver meal" instead of just chicken liver meal, since this would display the results for all three words, even if they occur separately.

If you are searching for a product that does not contain a particular ingredient, you can add a minus (-) directly in front of the keyword without a blank space (e.g. -yeast) to search for an entry that does not contain the word yeast). Please note that since this sort of keyword search will bring up any individual posts that do not contain the specified word, so results will not be 100% accurate - of course you will be presented with all entries that do not contain yeast, but for example a post that says "yeast free" would also be excluded since the word "yeast" appears in it.

In both cases of keyword search, please be aware that different manufacturers may spell some words differently, so for example "poultry byproducts" might also appear as "poultry-by-products" or "poultry by-products" and "whole ground rice" as "rice, ground whole" or "ground whole rice" etc.; so make sure you still read each entry carefully if you are looking for something specific.

Since all entries in the "Dry Food" forum are made only by me and at different times, a search by username or restricted date range isn't going to be of much use.

Comparing Products
I am still working on implementing a dynamic web interface which will let you choose multiple products to compare side by side, but it's not quite finished yet. Until then, you can either open multiple browser windows to compare individual products (press Control-N), or copy and paste information into a Word or Notepad document.

If you need any assistance, feel free to use the "Private Message" function in the "My Home" page of this forum to contact me. This requires registering a username though.

Edited by Mordanna (05/03/05 01:39 AM)