Originally Posted by
taco
Most forums will let you search 3 letters by putting a wild card in for the 4th, this forum won't allow it.
What is the harm of allowing 2-3 letter searches anyways. Sure it uses up some bandwidth but what is the harm in it. If someone wants to search for 2-3 letters why not let them??
Perhaps you should re-read the some of the posts above yours, in particular this one:
https://www.vadriven.com/forums/show...9&postcount=66 but the gist of it is that 3 letter searches are enabled. I'm not sure if wildcards (the * symbol) fall under boolean searches, but if it does it's only enabled for Patrons, which is where your problem would have been in that particular search query.
It has nothing to do with bandwidth and everything to do with server load. The searches are by far the biggest contributor to the slowness on the site, decreasing the number of letters allowed
greatly increases the server load. That's not even taking into account making the post index in the database bigger.
There's very few legitimate searches for 1-2 letter words so there's no reason to go that low. 3 letters is where it's staying.