Read the title. If everyone started using hashtags, search could be a lot easier.
If someone wants a yoyojam theory review, he could type in the search bar “#theory#review” and he would only get the posts that have the words #theory and #review(no one would use those words unless the post was about the theory and was a review). If he searched “yoyojam theory review”, he would get posts that have those three words(you might easily find irrelevant posts that have each word).
The search bar just looks for any thread including the words you searched for, not necessarily even as part of the topic. It then ranks then from most to least relevant. So if someone titled their thread #theory review, just searching for “theory review” would still find that review. Hashtags would just add an unnecessary extra step.
“theory review” would find a lot more posts than just theory reviews, whereas #theory would find only those posts about the theory.
But on second thought hashtags are probably not worth it. So forget it.
Maybe if they redesigned the search it would be useful. Because sometimes I see people starting threads about already discussed topics, and the person who started it says that he or she could not find anything in the search. So it could be useful, but as of right now I do not think so.
It does actually work. If you search “theory”, you get a bunch of results, but “#theory” just returns this thread, so the search is recognizing “#” as a literal character to search for.
Some forum software supports tags for threads, where instead of searching for words that appear in a thread, you can search for threads tagged with a keyword. If SMF supports that, it would probably be a more useful way to implement this, but you would still probably run into the issue of most people not using it.
