Forum Search - Problem I Have With It.

[Mankind]

Hi.

As most of you know you can't search for something on these forums unless it's a 4 letter word or more. For example:

You can search for "Pain Easer"

But...

You can't search for "Ray of God"

To get an answer you want you have to put the word together like "RayofGod", but the problem with that is you will find close to none results.

So can the forum moderators please lower the limit to 3 letters? Earlier I wanted to find some information on the forums about this exact example, but I couldn't because it wouldn't let me search for it.

Other examples:

DoY
Ray
Cap
Gun

Each of these small words could be important in a search.

Thanks.

(Btw I don't regularly check the other forums, but is there already a forum for this type of topic? A forum about the forum lol.)

[athon]

Spy, PA, MC5, PE, PSI, erm - can't be bothered to think of any more now. Just thought I'd add my support with a few extra words which can't be searched for :)

Athon Solo

[Rade]

Ive had alot of problems with this too, theres shitloads of 3 letter words that are really important in this particular community. I remember trying to search for the solution to the patch160 bug but couldnt find anything since "160" was too short...

[Nidhogg]

I would like a 3 char search too but it would make the forum indexes too large unfortunately.

N

[Heavyporker]

Ouch... indexes...

Shame the tools aren't smarter...

[Xian]

Putting stars around a three letter word will bring up results similar to it, but you will come up with results where a word just has 'doy' in that letter sequence, instead of something on Dome of York. As far as I know vB has restrictions on searching below 4 characters because of the mass of search results that come out.

So, if you don't mind trudging through a lot of results, type *DoY* (or whatever the word is).

/edit : Edited just to annoy/piss Niddy off.. I really feel like using rather big words at the moment just to really make those maths seem terribly, horrendously wrong.

:D

[Nidhogg]

Take the three posts above my first one above as an example. Between them, ignoring sigs, there are 247 words, 122 of which (47%) are 4 or more letters long. If we add 3 letter words to the index we must add a further 63 words, or 25%, raising the index from 49% of the total to 74.89% of all words. If you extend this to the entire forum database we are officially talking about a shitload of data (excuse the estimation at the end there :p)

N

/edit - none of the three posts in question had edits when I did the calculations, so if they get edited now it will mess up my maths - but you'll know they did it just to piss me off. ;)

[Forseti]

I'll talk to Dafire, see what he thinks about it.

[Lethal Virus]

Originally posted by athon
Spy, PA, MC5, PE, PSI, erm - can't be bothered to think of any more now. Just thought I'd add my support with a few extra words which can't be searched for :)

Athon Solo

ATI

[athon]

What about deleting old posts? There are a whole load of posts no one is likely to use - plus the fact we're not allowed to bump old posts. What if you cleared them out in favour of better searches?

Also, if you have someone who could modify the forums, could you not use a wordlist for the 3 letter words? Surely that would cut down on the space required?

Athon Solo

[Mantus]

Well athon the whole point of searching is to find answers to question that other people before you have asked instead of making new threads about old subjects.



I was thinking (oh oh) if this was implemented there would actually be less threads and therefore less data :eek:

Or if that’s not possible how about a system that only logs 2-3 letter words that are known abbreviations and acronyms in NC.

Btw i keep telling people the wildcard or (*) astrix search doesnt work if you try to search for more then one word. So its pretty much useless.