UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Suggestions for search

What about the following options for searching...

First One: In the admin control panel, what about an option to allow blank keyword searchs.

Reasoning: You could select a forum, set a date range (older than one day, newer than 3 days), and see all posts from that particular forum.

It could be limited still by the number of results returned, and of course, a site would have to enable this option in the control panel so everyone isn't subjected to it.

Next One: What about the option on the Search Screen to only return Open threads?

Reasoning: If searching for things, you could exclude threads that have already been locked/closed.

Thanks much!
Tim

Hmmm... no interest? I've got users who can't search on even simple terms that they could before, even after dropping the minimum searchable word length down to 0.

For example: "use tax" yeilds no hits. Apparantly it appears that verbs are excluded or something. I figured out that they can add * to each term and get the match, but still a little frustrating as I don't know 'what and why' is dropped from searches.

"+use +tax -refund"

makes sure use, tax are IN
and -refund is OUT

+use +tax yields no results, "use tax" yields no results, use* tax* yields results, but on closer inspection, it's retreiving tons of posts that don't necessarily include use and tax! Almost like the words are being removed and replaced with wildcards.

I'd love to have the option to disable whatever is excluding certain words.

By default MySQL's fulltext indexes exclude anything under 4 characters. For 7.3, I'm going to put in an option to use the old style homebrewed search engine that doesn't rely on the fulltext indexes.

Ahhh... ok, a MySQL thing then. It makes sense now.

I did find something on changing the MySQL behavior, including the customization of noise words.

I'd like to wait for 7.3, but there is that whole messy thing with the pitchforks, boiling oil, etc...

Thanks

Well, you can change the mysql minimum search length to any value you wish if you have access to edit the mysql configuration (/etc/my.cnf) which you won't have on a standard virtual host. But this limit is outside of anything threads can manage.

We run our install on a dedicated web server, as opposed to hosting it somewhere. Nothing is beyond my control

There's other aspects to it too, including rebuilding the fulltext indexes, etc. We also run a Bugzilla implementation on the same database/server though, so I don't want to get too outrageous.

Any way you can detect the current settings for the fulltext indexes and warn the user that the search cannot be done the new spiffy way.

Or automatic old style search when search word length is lower then MySQL settings.

Well, if you wish to allow "low character searches" look at the mysql "ft_min_word_len" option.

shared server, so no go...

Well, i posted the notice for you and the code for tim :x...

Thanks. Been there, done that The results were not as impressive as I anticipated though.

I still think this would be a nice option (figured I'd keep it from getting lost in the fray. )