Help for the PBS List reader

The area to the left ('sidebar') shows a list of messages, clicking on them will display the message in the main ('message') area to the right. Above these there is a row of icons that let you move through the messages - the navigation bar or 'navbar'.

The first two icons in the navbar show the year and month, hovering the mouse over them will open a menu allowing years and months to be selected.
The next icon shows how the messages in the sidebar are ordered. Possibilities include by date, author name, message subject, and by thread. Again hovering the mouse over this icon lets you change the type of order. Clicking on the icon reverses the order.

The set of arrow icons allow stepping through messages one by one and jumping to the first and last messages. The keyboard up and down cursor keys can also be used to step between messages.
Finally the 'Reply' button will attempt to launch your email program set up to reply to the current message. This is good because it gets the title correct and indicates which message you are replying to so threading works.

To search the messages, enter your search string in the icon to the top left of the window to the right of the word 'Search' and click on Go or press Return. As usual a list of messages will appear in the sidebar and you can step through them.

For the results of a search the thread order option is replaced by relevance which measures how good a match to your search the result is.

To return from the results of a search back to the normal listing of messages, click on the X to the right of Go near the search icon. This is useful if you want to read messages close to the result of a search.


Search uses the Zend Lucene search engine. This supports a powerful query language. Searching for primula will find those messages that contain the word primula. Searching for primula vulgaris will find messages that contain the words primula or vulgaris or both. Searching for "primla vulgaris" (with quotes) will find messages that contain the word primula followed by a space and then the word vulgaris.

Terms can be combined together with boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. The default is OR, so searching for primula vulgaris is equivalent to primula OR vulgaris. If one wanted to look for documents containing both words, a search string of primula AND vulgaris would be appropriate.


The field to search can be specified, the available fields are

content - the body of the message
title - the message title or subject
name - the name of the sender of the message
Field names are followed by a colon and the search data. For example, title:nomocharis name:David will find all messages with Nomocharis in the title and David in the senders name. To make the search more precise you could enter title:nomocharis name:"David Pilling" The default field searched is content, so unless you specify otherwise searches will be of the message bodies.


The full set of boolean operators is AND, OR, NOT, + and -.
The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that match the term after the "-" symbol, lilium -davidii
The "+" or required operator stipulates that the term after the "+" symbol must match the document. +lilium davidii


Parentheses can be used to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be useful if you want to control the precedence of boolean operators or mix different boolean queries. For example: +(nomocharis lilium) AND "David Pilling"


Words from a phrase that are within a specified word distance can be found. To do a proximity search use the tilde, "~", symbol at the end of the phrase. For example to search for a lilium and davidii within 10 words of each other "lilium davidii"~10


Parentheses can be used to link multiple clauses to a single field. For example; title:(nomocharis AND wiki)