Searching the forum

[Bob]

Are there a way to get around the limitation in the search feature, so that also words with <= 3 letters will be included in the search?

As of now, I only get the error "The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search" when I try to search for short words. Since TLAs are quite common in computer related stuff, I think the possibility to also search for 3 letter words would be nice. It could at least be nice that you could choose to do a new search after you get the first warning, where you choose to include also the shorter words.

I can't come up with any good examples right now, but I know this is something I've experienced as a small limitation a couple of times.

[suicidal_monkey]

vga dvi cpu ram psu hdd fdd usb ...

[Bob]

:withstupid:
It wasn't exactly that kind of examples I had in mind when I said I couldn't come up with something - it was more an example of anything I've been looking for recently that I couldn't find due to the search limitation :narnar:

[BigFatCat]

WoW? BF2? VPN, net, DSL....

Maybe.

[Bob]

Argh :ranting:

The example wasn't the point here, you nitwits
Never mind I even said that, just a silly figure of speach - no more TBAs please (yeah, I know one of you wackos will come with an excessive list pretty soon anyhow...)...

[Gandalf]

currently set at 4;

Search Index Minimum Word Length
When using the vBulletin default search, this option limits the size of indexed words. The smaller this number is, the larger your search index, and conversely your database is going to be.

I could decrease it to three but the better option is to include key words;

Words to be Included Despite Character Limit
If there are special words that are important for your forum but are outside the word length limits you specified above, you may enter them here so that they will be included in the search index.

So, lets have a list of the key words to include

[Bob]

If there are special words that are important for your forum but are outside the word length limits you specified above, you may enter them here so that they will be included in the search index.

Do you have the possibility to add a list of stopwords to exclude, instead of just setting a word size limit?

I'm taking a course called Knowledge in Document Collections (basically about web search and indexing, data mining etc), and we gave just been given such a list of stopwords for a project we're about to start on. Is this something you can use?

So, lets have a list of the key words to include

What about just adding 'bob', so that when people say nice things about me in posts, I don't have to bookmark all those threads - think I'd need a new HDD for that :narnar:

[Gandalf]

stop words can be used, but it's not something I've seen applied to small forums. And the fact that there is over 500 of them means the list will become prohibitively large as there is no easy way of entering them (you just get a small box on the admincp for these words)