I'm trying to search and everything I type in comes back with the "didn't meet minimum word threshold (4) so won't be found. If using wildcard, be more specific" message. I'm using more than four words and no wildcards. Is anyone else having trouble with search today?

it is the number of letters in the word. took me forever to figure that out. and it is annoying and stoopid. cant use low or fat or cal.

go figure.

ah, gotcha... thanks!

worked perfectly when I changed the word length! Would never have thought of that, I kept increasing number of words...

Yeah, I don't like that the word length is set at 4 - especially on a site like this where "fat" or "cal" or "low" are all valid search words. I know it's possible to change that in the software ....

Could we petition to get that done, pretty please???

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Petition sent.

Sorry, no dice vB suggested the minimum of 4 letters because every word on the forum is stored in a searchable index, which contains millions of words. By eliminating 1, 2, and 3 letter words, it helps keep the index manageable and allowed searching without bogging the server down. I was told the forum could grind to a halt.

That's how it was explained to me

Suzanne, I've owned a forum runnign this software before. I have to tell you, whoever told you the forum would "grind to a halt" is lying.

The 3 letter search will cause searches to slow down. It won't affect the rest of the board. Really. I promise. You can email me and I'll even call you and talk to you about it if you want.

I've owned this software for a LOOOOOOONG time and I know how it works.

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Thanks for the suggestion

However, it was a vB developer that personally told me this, not another user. I was told it depends on the size of the database, and our database is around 4 GB in size which is too large to pull it off. We've had performance issues in the past, due to the size of the forum along with the amount of traffic were receive. We've tweaked and been tweaked many times, and unfortunately this is one of them. So for now, we'll stick with the 4 character minimum. We will be upgrading in the near future to vB 3.7.x as well as upgrading our mysql/php, so that should improve performance as well as functionality, and we may choose to include at least a selection of 3 character words.

Thanks