I think that the user's complaint is valid. It would be swell -- not to mention very helpful -- if TPTB at vB would allow smaller words. Both for searching here and for searching at the dot.com site.

There are several vB keywords that are less than 4 characters plus many more words in the common vB vernacular and even more where the vocabulary of vB and the larger Web overlap.

Thanks

See post #2

I ran into the same problem when I tried to search for something that had 'pm' in the title. I never thought to use the wildcard, though.

Thanks Marco,

I'm guessing that you're thinking of Mr. Luke's concern that "the [vB official] sites would have to be completely offline" for "several days to change all the databases". (emphasis added)

Good News! It is very possible that, that amount of downtime is not necessary.

It might be done with just a couple of hours -- or a few -- of "no new posts" time and a few minutes of actual down time to reload and restart.

The MySQL docs suggest that text search tables can be copied offline from the running database and then separately indexed, then differenced and replaced in the only briefly halted database.

There is some info on this in the MySQL docs for "Full-text Search Functions". For example: "A FULLTEXT index definition can be ... added later using ALTER TABLE or CREATE INDEX. For large data sets, it is much faster to load your data into a table that has no FULLTEXT index and then create the index after that, than to load data into a table that has an existing FULLTEXT index. "

It might be possible to mitigate the difference issue by pulling the copy at the beginning of low-peak and then running the index on a separate, dedicated and MySQL optimized machine. (The regular back-ups are probably run at the off-peak times already.)

A test run will tell you if actual significant downtime is necessary beyond a few hours of off-peak "no new posts" time.

Hope this is helpful. It would be so very helpful to have the shorter search terms.

An alternative for the vB.official sites might be to set up a dedicated in-house search [Google?] engine.

PS: the link above goes to the MySQL 3.x/4.x docs. The same info is in the 5.x docs and in the 6.x docs also.

It is the fact that we have several dedicated MySQL servers powering the sites and that changes need to be replicated across all of them before the servers can be brought back online. It has been tested and our developers know the techniques.

If it were as trivial as people seem to think it is, we would have made the change already.

Thanks. Great to know.

I don't think anybody means to insult you guys or to trivialize the work that you do. I surely didn't mean to suggest that the task was trivial. (Merging different versions of DB tables is anything but trivial.)

It's just a much needed feature from the users' point of view -- and you have the good fortune of having a constant supply of new users who are bound by necessity to ask the same questions again and again.

Getting the same questions over and over may not seem so fortunate but its always a sign of goodness.

Thanks for your kind responses.

It's often really difficult to solve a problem when the error message given by a vB / mySQL install contains many instances of the lettered words or error numbers.