Sometimes I'd like to search for something in a specific forum - is there a way to do this? For instance,a book title or author and I want to avoid the 'games' forum where it's been listed and stolen 100000 times and I'm looking for a hopeful discussion or recommendation of that book.

No :-b  It'd be nice, though!

sigh..yes it would! I like to look for specific things and a lot are used in swaps or the book bazaar and it's worthless to search through all those posts I know aren't gonna hve what I'm looking for...and sometimes I'm wanting to look in the book bazaar!

This is a good suggestion - you might want to send in feedback using the Contact Us - Send Feedback link at the bottom of every PBS page!  I have had the same concern.  If I want to see what people thought of Eat, Pray, Love for example -- I will get a ton of Book Bazaar and Games hits.

If you like the idea, be sure to use the Contact Us link, click on Send Feedback, and choose Suggestion option.

The more the site admins hear about an idea, the more likely they are to act on it.  We can't be sure they read every single forum post and make note of the ideas that come up there (in fact, that's highly unlikely, IMHO, although they do seem to see quite a few of them and have added comments in many...)

(My pet project is to get the Book Cover Image link in the Edit Book Data section either fixed or marked as "This section not currently functional. "  If anyone wants to help me with this, please also send in feedback about this!)