Thanks for your thoughts on this.
3. I know one can search title but it is extremely cumbersome for multiple searches with multiple page refreshes.
4. You can't search titles from the top of a forum but must click the spy glass. Then you need to find your forum again, that you were just in, in the list of forums below. Finally, after executing your search on the title you quite often want to search again, but your previous selection is lost, not sticky. You must once again find the forum in the list and check it prior to the next search.
And the searches have two more general problems which we find often debilitating:
A. They take a long time to come back, at least on the dotnetnuke site.
B. The precision seems fine but the recall is very low. It appears to us as if a query such as <programmatic module> is executed internally by the forum search as if it were entered "programmatic module", in other words it only returns items in the case that the query words occur contiguously, i.e. next to each other in the searched text. This is contrary to industry expectations for search, and undermines the value of the search to some considerable extent. There are many documents of interest in which the terms 'programmatic' and 'module' occur, but not next to each other.
The DotNetNuke endeavor is wonderful but the documentation is somewhat limited. I am sure many developers depend on the forums. If this is true the progress of DotNetNuke itself could be much accelerated if the forum search was not so limited.
Thanks for listening.