Unraveled

Today I have a few random tips for you! While none of these features are really secret, they are a bit lesser known and can make your Ravelry experience even faster, friendlier, and more organized.

Topic Tools

On your forums tab, clicking in the small column to the right of any forum thread will bring up a Topic Tools menu. With this menu, you can:

• watch thread: this will keep the thread at the top of the forums list whenever there are new posts you haven’t read. In busy groups with lots of forum activity, it is handy to watch interesting threads so that you see new posts that might otherwise have fallen down on the list of threads.
• ignore thread: ignoring a thread will make it disappear from your forums list and you never have to see it again. Sometimes we know right from the thread title that this would be a good idea, right? Ignore ignore. Aaaaaah.
• mark unread: this option will mark all the posts in your selected thread as unread.
• mark all read: and this one will mark all the posts in the selected thread as read.
• read up to post: at the bottom, you can manually select the post number you’d like to have marked as read to.

Find Your Friends with People Search

If you have a friend on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or another social network that we can link to in Ravelry profiles, and would like to connect with them here on Ravelry, you can search for their other-site usernames in our People Search. If your friend connected the other site to their Ravelry profiles, we’ll be able to find them for you! Here, I found Casey using his Twitter name, CaseyF.

Quick Search and Links

My last quick tip today is partly for me – I always forget about the quick search options you can find through the magnifying glass tab visible on every Ravelry page, and I really shouldn’t because they are so handy! If you are unfamiliar with them too, let’s start using them together. Not only can you quickly link to the advanced searches for, well, everything, by clicking on the option in the advanced search section (like patterns, people, yarns, forums, etc.), you can also use the search field on the magnifying glass tab to bring up speedy results right there. Because this quick search will search across everything on Ravelry, it will bring up a lot of results, so it can help to narrow your list by typing in the category of thing you are looking for. You’ll still see lots of options – for example, here is a search for “hitchhiker pattern:”

As you can see, not only is there a handy link right to results for sources and patterns with Hitchhiker in the name, but you’ll also see related forum topics and projects. You can click right on a specific pattern/project/etc. to go right to that individual item, or click on the advanced search button at the top right of any grouping if you want to refine your quick search results even further.

I hope this post showed you a little something new today, and you are inspired to go looking for even more features you aren’t aware of! The site is so big there is always something new to explore. The good news is, you’ll never break Ravelry by clicking, and you just might find something really useful!