Forum search

[chrisjj]

I would be nice if the forum search worked properly e.g. finding key word zip from user chrisjj falsely reports no matches.

[aussieboykie]

Whilst it's not explicitly stated, the fact that search by keyword and search by user are positioned horizontally adjacent to one another in the advanced menu may mean that you can use one or the other, not both. If that's the case, you'd expect an error message if you specify both - or a mechanism to disable the other field as soon as you type in one of them.

Regards, AB

[chrisjj]

Whilst it's not explicitly stated, the fact that search by keyword and search by user are positioned horizontally adjacent to one another in the advanced menu may mean that you can use one or the other, not both.

Other field pairs don't so behave.

[aussieboykie]

This would be a feature of the forum management software (vBulletin). I had a quick look at their forums but didn't manage to locate any matching Q&As. As you might expect, they are running the very latest version of their own software and I can confirm that it exhibits the same problem that you described in your original post.

Regards, AB

[chrisjj]

Thanks. I see the problem doesn't occur with e.g. key word compare . Perhaps there's a bug specific to short words.

[Chris]

Chris,

Thanks for the suggestion. The search features built into vBulletin leave something to be desired. Google does a pretty good job of indexing these forums if vBulletin search isn't working for you. As an example, using the search terms "site:http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/ chrisjj zip" in Google comes up with some good hits.

[Michael Bulgrien]

How about integrating a google "Search forums" box on the Scooter support site. It could go right under the "Search knowledgebase" search box. It could programatically preface the users search criteria with "site:http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/"

[chrisjj]

Google does a pretty good job of indexing these forums

For old posts yes, but not for those in recent weeks.

[Chris]

This is actually a limitation of the default MySQL configuration. vBulletin uses MySQL fulltext search when searching the forums, MySQL defaults to a minimum of 4 characters for fulltext searches. I'll look at our server configuration to see what's involved in changing the limit.

[chrisjj]

> MySQL defaults to a minimum of 4 characters for fulltext searches.

What's the advantage of that, one wonders!

> I'll look at our server configuration to see what's involved in changing the limit.

Thanks.

[Dave_L]

> MySQL defaults to a minimum of 4 characters for fulltext searches.

What's the advantage of that, one wonders!

The reason is probably to reduce the size of the index that MySQL maintains, which saves space and possibly speeds up searches too.

[chrisjj]

The reason is probably to reduce the size of the index that MySQL maintains, which saves space and possibly speeds up searches too.

By all of 100Kbytes and 1%, I'd guess