soulDistortion

Right now, when a someone uses the search function, the minimum length for character strings is 4.

We've had quite a few people ask as to why they aren't able to search for terms containing 3 letters. Now, on most forums, there isn't a need to search for 3-letter string, however, given the nature of this board, there are several terms that are 3 letters that people would like to look for (such as WRX or RWD).

When someone does a search, essentially they're asking the database to look through all the posts at all the words longer than our minimum length (i.e., it looks at all strings 4 or more characters long).

Because of that, the search function is a fairly demanding action on the database. If we lowered the minimum length to three, imaging how many more words would be added to that search. Think of how many instances words such as "the" comes up. Imagine the strain on the database when that happens. Now imagine 50 people doing it at once.

The logical answer to that would naturally be to filter words that the database searches through to prevent common words from being added, but unfortunately, this is currently not an option with our forum software.

We have experimented with lowering the minimum length to three before, and to put it simply, it failed miserably.

While the minimum was set to three, just a few people searching at the same time would cause the site to crash. And since people quite often search the site, the site subsequently crashed repeatedly until we raised the minimum and reindexed the database.

So, until the forum software offers us the ability to have more control over the way searching happens, we will have to keep the minimum length for searchable string at 4 characters.

eng

For all the curious people out there. Hopefully this limitation will be lifted once the new version of vBulletin is released (version 3). It should come with a much improved search function.

Don't get your hopes up quite yet. This is still a wait and see kinda thing.