Closed or Resolved: Glitch with "Check for Existing Threads" in the Start New Thread page?

[ScottK]

I posted in the Water Cooler forum "Is anyone picking up the final Harry Potter Book?" and clicked the existing threads button and got this message:

The search term you specified (Is) is under the minimum word length (3) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.
If this term contains a wildcard, please make this term more specific.

FYI

[Marc]

It's not a glitch per se. The problem is vBulletin has a poor search engine. It works, but sometimes no as one would expect. I can reduce the letter count to 2 letters to try to account for '2 letter words', but the tradeoff is server load increase. How bad it will be I cannot predict. I know on large forums it can be pretty dramatic, depending on how many servers are sharing the load. This is a rather small forum on a single server, so....

I'll try changing it later today and see what happens.

[Jim Wynne]

Originally Posted by Marc

It's not a glitch per se. The problem is vBulletin has a poor search engine. It works, but sometimes no as one would expect. I can reduce the letter count to 2 letters to try to account for '2 letter words', but the tradeoff is server load increase. How bad it will be I cannot predict. I know on large forums it can be pretty dramatic, depending on how many servers are sharing the load. This is a rather small forum on a single server, so....

I'll try changing it later today and see what happens.

So that search function only looks at the first contiguous string?

[Marc]

Originally Posted by Jim Wynne

So that search function only looks at the first contiguous string?

I *think* a 2 letter word anywhere in the text string kills it.

I went ahead and changed it in the vBulletin preferences, but.... When using the Fulltext search, this option limits the size of words that may be searched for. Smaller words take longer to search for as they are more common. MySQL Fulltext has its own minimum word length as well that must be changed at the server level. That said, I'm not sure but I think that MySQL is set at a 3 letter minimum on the server. Changing that may, or may not, be something I can do because it requires a complete recompile of MySQL and is *highly* NOT recommended.

[Jim Wynne]

Originally Posted by Marc

I *think* a 2 letter word anywhere in the text string kills it.

I went ahead and changed it in the vBulletin preferences, but.... When using the Fulltext search, this option limits the size of words that may be searched for. Smaller words take longer to search for as they are more common. MySQL Fulltext has its own minimum word length as well that must be changed at the server level. That said, I'm not sure but I think that MySQL is set at a 3 letter minimum on the server. Changing that may, or may not, be something I can do because it requires a complete recompile of MySQL and is *highly* NOT recommended.

I tried initiating (for testing purposes) a thread with the title, "My sister's hernia" without quote marks and got:

Sorry - I didn't find any matches for the Key Word(s) you entered to search for. Please try some different terms. NOTE: There is a 3 character minimum search word limit. Search the Elsmar Cove Forums again

Then I tried "Is this a good title?" (without the quote marks) and got

The search term you specified (a) is under the minimum word length (2) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer. If this term contains a wildcard, please make this term more specific.

It pegged a title beginning with "is" as too short, but was OK with a title beginning with "my."

[Marc]

Yes - It doesn't throw out the one letter word "a" as one would expect. Unfortunately, it's the built in vBulletin search engine and I can't change it to work like something like Google.

I know it's not perfect, but the "check for existing threads" mod (hack) is at least a help in some cases.

[Marc]

Originally Posted by Jim Wynne

It pegged a title beginning with "is" as too short, but was OK with a title beginning with "my."

Note I just changed the prefs to allow 2 letter word searches. Now, if you're wanting a one letter word search, it's not going to happen with this software.