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Jasoco wrote:phpBB's inability to search for anything three characters or less is ridiculous. If that's an option it should be turned off. If it's a limitation of the software, then we should switch to something else. Limiting search terms to 4 or more characters and disallowing common words is an unnecessary restriction on a forum like this.

However zorg's solution does work, but it's not something people are going to know to do.

THIS! I completely forgot, but 60% of the things I want to search seem to be 3 or less characters.

It's a technical limitation. For the search, phpBB indexes the words within a message. It doesn't index three letter words because there would be too many to index.

pgimeno wrote:It's a technical limitation. For the search, phpBB indexes the words within a message. It doesn't index three letter words because there would be too many to index.

Which is a stupid limitation because most other forum software has absolutely no qualms about 3-letter words. We shouldn't be using phpBB then. A three letter limitation is not something you should have on a support forum. It's the opposite of user-friendly.

Jasoco wrote:We shouldn't be using phpBB then.

I'd bet money it's actually MySQL's fault. If so, I think there's a config setting that can be changed to let it index shorter words (can't remember what it's called, though). Typing something like "site:love2d.org/wiki png" isn't really that horrible, though.

airstruck wrote:

Jasoco wrote:We shouldn't be using phpBB then.

I'd bet money it's actually MySQL's fault. If so, I think there's a config setting that can be changed to let it index shorter words (can't remember what it's called, though). Typing something like "site:love2d.org/wiki png" isn't really that horrible, though.

How would it be MySQL's fault? It's just a table based database. It can store data from one or zero characters in length to hundreds upon hundreds of characters and a "search database" in phpBB is literally just a table full of every single word and what post they belong to. I used to use phpBB. I switched to punBB long ago and it's a much nicer and better piece of forum software. Even vBulletin (Which NeoGAF, one of, if not the most popular online forum, uses.) has no problems with searching for 1, 2 or 3 character words. Each forum software does things differently, so obviously punBB and vBulletin have both figured out much more optimized ways of storing search databases. Or they don't care that there's a lot of 1, 2 and 3 letter words and store them anyway confident in their own abilities to still find results quickly.

If there's an option to index smaller words, we should turn it on. If there's a mod to allow it, we should use it. This forum isn't nearly busy enough that it would cause problems. And indexing large SQL tables is trivial. Google's index is surely stored in SQL-like databases and that houses the sum of all human knowledge and searches are instant.

The point is, right now it's just phpBB being a stupid unnecessary bottleneck and it shouldn't be. It's basically like complaining that my horse and carriage doesn't get me to work fast enough every day while everyone around me is getting there on time in their shiny fast automobiles. To me it seems phpBB's search limit is a leftover from the early days of forums. Servers and SQL database software are so much faster now than they were in 2000. Stop riding to work in a wooden horse-drawn carriage and go buy yourself a nice Mustang.

Boy, this topic sure got off track didn't it?

Note: I'm not necessarily saying we should put forth the effort to switch forum software. Just pointing out flaws in an otherwise highly usable system.

Jasoco wrote:How would it be MySQL's fault?

Like this.

Boy, this topic sure got off track didn't it?

And somehow it seems like an improvement...

The original topic kind of got answered already and sort of devolved ( or, imo, evolved ) into you lot ranting about PHP88 and MySQL, which is better than me looking stupid in front of the entire community.

Jasoco wrote:How would it be MySQL's fault? It's just a table based database. <snip>

I take a quick look at the code and it seems that now there are options to implement search as a separate table (the old behaviour) or to use the database engine's text search feature.

Jasoco wrote:I used to use phpBB. I switched to punBB long ago and it's a much nicer and better piece of forum software. Even vBulletin <snip>

I suggested MyBB. Feature-wise it's almost on par with vBulletin, but MyBB is free. I'll have to check punBB in more detail.

Jasoco wrote:Boy, this topic sure got off track didn't it?

Yeah, sorry.

anastasiaorosegirl wrote:The original topic kind of got answered already and sort of devolved ( or, imo, evolved ) into you lot ranting about PHP88 and MySQL, which is better than me looking stupid in front of the entire community.

Everyone starts off without knowledge, then they discover it in many ways