I think if instead of putting
posts-by:johnrobinson
You type just
by:johnrobinson
You will get a page with all of John's articles posted
Then click on "comments" and you will get all of his comments.
I think some of your other concerns are answered Here
Some noob figured it out, who'd thunk it LOL
Thanks for the FYI. I had already figured out most of it. I just don't think it's very clean. Hardly user friendly for new users. Even old users would have to re-discover how to do certain things if you don't do them on a regular basis. I'd start by handling the "Go" box in a consistent way by requiring a command, followed by a colon, followed by a value:
If I click on a "Topic" area such as "US: Virginia (News/Activism)" only "va-news" is plugged into the "Go" box. Obviously if I hit "Go" again it becomes a keyword search instead of the Topic search.
If no command is entered then it's fine that it defaults to a keyword search.
Maybe later on you could add additional functionality to allow a semi-colon delimited list of values.