There are two issues with the forum search function that are really causing us some difficulty.

The first is that, despite the fact that the minimum word length is set to 3 characters in the control panel, we are not able to successfully search on 3 characters (e.g. specifying 'bug' as a search word). In order to search successfully, we must specify at least 4-character search keywords. Basically, we need to be able to locate posts with the word 'bug' in them. LOL It worked perfectly in the previous software version.


The other is that we are unable to determine that the search function supports wildcards. In version 6, a wildcard was "assumed" at the beginning and end of each search argument, and searching on, for example, 'play' would return posts with any word containing 'play' (e.g. player, played, replay, etc.), and you had to specifically limit the search using quotation marks if you didn't want that kind of search. In version 7, the search only returns posts containing the exact keyword entered. We've tried all the standard wildcard characters, without success.


Is it possible that there are some control panel or database settings that we are unaware of that would resolve these issues?

Thanks!

Carla

I've already reported the string length issue as a bug in the bug forum.

I've also confirmed that the standard * wildcard does not work. Other full boolean text search operators seem to work, such as +, - and grouping with quotes "". No wildcard however. Also reported but not yet resolved.

My users won't use the search function now. I had such hopes when I heard it was going to be full boolean text search. The current implementation is quite a few steps backwards from UBB.c unfortunately.

Yeah... search needs some work, I agree. I've reported issues myself. Hopefully it'll be fixed up to Classic levels at least

I thought of a workaround for the first problem: i added a replacement word in the censor list. I replaced the word Bug= with _bug_

Now we locate posts with the word BUG in it (particularly useful during our internal betas).

I thought I might share this.

three letter searches didn't work for me even when the threads software was set to do three character searches. until i found out this from Rick:
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I think that may be a limitation on your host. Some hosts have the minimum search index at 4 characters for MySQL, so it won't find any results on 3 character searches. You'll want to contact your host and check what they have for the minimum character length for MySQL full text indexing.
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I did some digging and found that the variable is:
ft_min_word_len
by default, it was set to 4. I lowered this to 3 and everything works fine on 3 character searches.