Can the search function be tweaked to allow shorter words?

[DJ]

Any word with less than 3 letters is ignored by the search function. For example, when i search for "Give me FPS", I get the message that "me" and "fps" are too short, so it only searches for "give". Basically, there is no way to search for a 3 letter word.

I've found this behavior frustrating on several occasions. Is this something you have the power to change?

 

[CitizenX]

There is a setting in XenForo that allows shorter words, but the database engine uses 4+ letter words for indexing, so adjusting that setting has no practical effect on the Hub searches. It might be possible to force a search of a series of words (for example if you search "Give me FPS" it would search for those three words in sequence) but pulling that off is not as straightforward as I'd hoped.

On the plus side, the custom api we're using for the in-game Hub browser supports words of any length.

 

[meshedvr]

Yeah I looked at this last week and it requires changing a setting in mysql and re-indexing everything which was more than I was willing to do as it had a bunch of steps and didn't seem that straightforward. The other option was to move to a better search engine for the forum software and that was even more complex. Perhaps sometime in the future we can look into this.

 

[CitizenX]

Yeah, the problem with fulltext indexes is that you can't (well more accurately shouldn't) change their structure on a table that already has content. The right way to do it is to rebuild the table from scratch and re-populate the data. Which is, as you say, not straightforward, and it almost certainly involves down-time, especially if you have to reset some of the parameters within the MySQL settings itself. At that point you're probably almost better just performing an ancillary search directly on the title column. Still a bit of work to figure out, but at least it's not an issue for the in-game searches.