KNOBBLED SEARCH, Cannot fathom arbitrary 4-letter MINIMUM

[Xstack]

If I search the forums on a software whose name is 4-letters or more .. ie Firefox, Seamonkey, et al there is no problem getting results.

Much more often I want to search a 3-letter name like K3b, MAD etc etc etc, not least because less typing means less mistakes, and the search is knobbled arbitrarily in this forum.

I think good software designers find small names for their wares, and the limit seems arbitrary to me?

Can it be changed?

[Jcink]

The database type of these forums is MySQL. The minimum stored word length in the search index is set to 4 by default. The reason is performance based. Lowering the default limit of MySQL's fulltext search will cause a significant slowdown as the database grows. This is because now the index is storing so many extra words like "the", "and", etc.

I see your frustration though; for example if someone wants to search for VLC or KVM they can't. That's kind of annoying. But I have an idea though, apparently if you search for a 3 letter word using *'s it allows it to work.

So for the time being you can sort of search by doing:

*VLC*, *KVM* etc

I can probably have this automatically detected and do a non-fulltext search for better results, because that isn't the best solution either.