UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Search enhancement

As soon as the less than 5 character search gets fixed it would be nice to also have the column headers clickable again so that you can sort by each of the items such as DATE/POSTER/FORUM etc...

explain "fixed"? We've had an option in the cp to adjust the minimum word length since 7.0 came out, so I'm not sure what you mean by "fixed"...
CP -> Feature Settings -> Search -> "Minimum Searchable Word Length

And all is set to 3 even in MySQL but all terms less than 5 characters is ignored.

Here is an example of searching for the term "bug" for 36 weeks, here on this board using 7.1b2


It seems that 4 characters is searchable on THIS board, but on mine anything less than 5 returns the "no results" error and mine is set to 3 characters and I'm running 7.02 so I consider that broken.

In theory (not advised, but possible) if I set MySQL to search for 2 character length it will search for it (would cause problems and instablility but would still sort of work) yet now with it set to 3 I can not search for less than 5.

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vb used to be 2 characters, but I notice that 4 is now the minimum there, so looks like it is outside the control of the software, which is a shame.

hmm.. now this is going to make me work harder. Just did some 4 character searches okay, yet the other day when some of my Mods were complaining I tried and could not make some 4 character searches. Odd why/what I searched on and why it did not return, yet now it does.

i can tell you know this already, but i'm gonna put it in here anyway cause someone else may find it helpful and it's related to this thread...

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.

Yes I know and I run a dedicated server with full admin rights on it.

But... now that I'm thinking back I may not have MySQL set correctly as I had to do a couple of restores due to some unforeseen issues.

This now jogs my memory and I may have restored back to a point where MySQL was not setup fully. I'll have to go back and check it out.

Well there you go. When I was having a lot of problems initially with my upgrade I had restored the system which set MySQL back to default which was preventing 3 character searches.
I had forgotten all about the restores I had done for MySQL back then as I knew I had set it up before.

Reset it back up in MySQL

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3
[myisamchk]
ft_min_word_len=3

Then stopped and restarted MySQL then:
REPAIR TABLE ubbt_posts;

Then restarted MySQL again and searching for 3 characters works as expected.

Remember that searches for values that exist in 50% or more of the posts will be ignored and it won't return the requested search as it will be too common.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html

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@Rick,

What CREATE INDEX syntax do you use for creating the index in the first place?

I was going to drop the index and create but was not sure so I did the repair (without the quick) in this case to be safe.

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You care to share Rick?

Here's our current fulltext index which allows for the subject to be searched alone or both the subject and body:

alter table ubbt_POSTS add FULLTEXT(POST_SUBJECT,POST_DEFAULT_BODY)

Thanks Rick