Even though members are gradually getting the hang of putting in pennant numbers in the correct format (and maybe moderators working hard at it too), I still don't understand why it is necessary to fill it in twice. But, anyway, there is a more serious problem with the search which is now completely non-intuitive due the attempted imposition of national prefixes. We are supposed to know the site's chosen national prefix in order to search for a ship. A sort of list is at the foot of
http://www.shipspotting.com/support/faq.php?category=Military ships but it is a strange one. For example:
1- Brazil is given as "NE". That's nonsense - the only navy ships using that are their training ships, for the simple reason that it stands for Navio Escola.
2- What language is "ARBV" for Venezuela? - it looks like a mixture of English and Spanish, and I cannot find any official use of it; the navy itself is "Armada Bolivariana de Venezuela" - ABV
3- Some are abbreviations for the navy itself, rather than a prefix for a ship
4- Some are equivalents in English, some are what the country concerned uses in its own language.
5- Some have multiple possibilities - eg Sweden
6- Possibly a few typos too - eg the apparent "I" in the "HNIMS" (Netherlands), perhaps it should be "L", though I don't understand why.
This hopeless for an intuitive search using the most important word that people start with - the ship's name. And non-member searchers would never find such a well-hidden list.
David