Forum search

virtualdave

Well-known member
Not sure if this is something that's configurable, but seems the forum search doesn't allow for "short" search terms, such as "led" or "spi" or 'i2c". Any chance that can be adjusted? easy enough to do it through google, but nice if we could search via the forum search as well.

Thanks,
David
 
Thought I'd bring this up again since I hit it again searching for mp3. Clearly lots of postings for mp3, yet none show up in the search. There's always google, but seems that 3 letter searches never yield anything.

Cheers,
David
 
I've come across this as well. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that it was a security thing to keep bots from DDoS'ing the servers by running tons of single-char searches, but I'm not sure.
 
Somehow we lost 3 character searches in the upgrade from vbulletin 4.2.0 to 4.2.2. It's a feature vBulletin disables by default for performance reasons.

Robin tried to re-enable it, but apparently it's broken in this 4.2.2 version, at least if the database was converted from 4.2.0. Unfortunately, we really have to be on 4.2.2 for security fixes.

I've been intending to look into this, but so far developing code, fixing libraries and answering questions has taken priority. It's unlikely I'll manage to put any significant time into it, and even if I do, I suspect the answer will be it's simply a bug in 4.2.2 and we'll need to wait for vBulletin to fix it in 4.2.3 or later.
 
Oh yeah, the DDoS stuff was unrelated to the search. At least I think it was. It probably wasn't even meant to be a denial of service attack, just a poorly designed spam bot. The main problem was our old server was, well, very old. It was barely handling the load of all the php and mysql this forum uses for normal users, so when a bot came in an rapidly fetched lots of pages, it effectively turned into a denial of service on the whole website.

Several weeks ago we upgraded to a new & much faster server for the forum. The vBulletin upgrade was done at the same time. Version 4.2.2 was released only days before that upgrade, so it turned out to be good timing.
 
Don't worry about it, Paul! Searching through google works just as well (e.g. mp3 site:http://forum.pjrc.com). I personally would rather you work on the things you wanted to work on...have a feeling (and rightfully so!) this isn't one of them :)

Cheers,
David
 
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