Forum search is somewhat broken
 

Okay, first: Searching for 3 letter words doesn't work. It used to tell you at least that you didn't have enough characters, but now it just tells you no results. Anyways, this should be removed. When you have servers like Era, and you can't even search for that server on the forums, there's a problem.

Related to the above, if you have a 3-letter word(or less) along with another, it omits the 3-letter word and gives you back results for the second word. For example, "Era Playerworld" nets you a ton of results that contain the word "playerworld" but none have anything to do with "Era".

I propose the character limit be lowered to 2.

Yeah, I constantly try searching for 3 letter words in hope that it has been changed but it hasn't.

It would also be awesome to remove the wait time between searches for registered members. If not remove it then at least lower it to 5 or 10 seconds.

Yeah it's rather annoying when you're trying to locate something specificly.
*search*
*backspace*
*twiddle thumbs*
*retry*
"5 seconds remaining"
*continute twiddling*
*re-search*

for me it's more like search, waiting, 25 seconds remaining, 15 seconds remaining, 5,4,3,2,1, search.

Same, but I didn't want to spam like mad. At least the counter could be lowered and dynamically displayed.

It's also horrible when you typo something.

Yeah, the search timer is about 15 seconds too long. and the 3 letter word thing isnt good. I've been periodically screwed over by not being able to search something that includes 3 letters. Sometimes I get no results, other times i get overloaded with dozens upon dozens of pages of unneeded search results.

I searched "currently" in thread titles the other day, and got no results :(

Ya I think searching in thread titles is broken too :(

We have reduced the time between searches to 15 seconds.

could we allow three letter words as well? I was trying to search PWA the other day and it said there was no results.

Yeah, I have tried searching for things like 'Era' in the levels forum and have been stuck with using 'modern' which doesn't give the same results.

The minimum word length is probably a restriction coming from MySQL Fulltext Search which only allows words of minimum 4 characters (for a good reason, technologically speaking).

If Stefan wanted to support >4 character words he'd have to add a special case for them and try a LIKE '%foo%', but it is possible that would be too intensive on the server... in which case he'd have to turn to an external searching solution like Sphinx or Lucene.

Point is that this might be more complicated than it seems.

This thread is a winner. Thanks Stefan.

Well that would be a problem. Either way, ya, it seems "search in title" seems broken.

Also, thanks Stefan!

It's like the larger avatar request thread doesn't even exist.

:confused: