Advanced Multilingual Search [Translated Hack]

This hack was originally written by 007pig of vbulletin-chinese.com for users to preform search for Chinese text as well as conduct full text search directly on the post table. Due to member request on vbulletin.com, I have translated this hack and obtained 007pig's permission to re-release the translated version for vbulletin customers to use.

Things to take note about this hack:
This hack does two things, 1) enable your forum script to handle Asian characters which uses two bytes (16 bit) as opposed to the Western European one byte (8 bit) characters; and 2) it gives the administrator an option to preform full text search directly on the post table and hence save disk space by omitting the search indexes. Please note that preforming full text search directly on the post table will have a preformance impact on forums with large amount of posts simply because it will need to process through all the posts.

Please note that I have only tested this with vB 3.0.3 but not above. However, in theory it should work for all versions higher. Please remember to back up your files before you apply this hack! Without further delay, I'll attach the hack here. I will also try to provide support for this hack as much as I can, however, I cannot guarentee that I can solve all your problems as I did not make this hack myself.

PLEASE BACK UP YOUR FILES AND DATABASE BEFORE APPLYING THIS HACK!

this seems very interesting, however, does this system works on all servers ?! fulltext serach is involved in what level here?! because the default variation in vbulletin is bugged, and not working in many situations...

would it be possible to "merge" the fulltext system JohnWoo built last year so everything work: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=62282 ?!

[HuangA]

Originally Posted by nexialys

this seems very interesting, however, does this system works on all servers ?! fulltext serach is involved in what level here?! because the default variation in vbulletin is bugged, and not working in many situations...

would it be possible to "merge" the fulltext system JohnWoo built last year so everything work: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=62282 ?!

Hm... yah, I guess a few things I forgot to mention when making the above post... was kind of in a hurry and then gave the link to the persont hat needed.

The original hack stated that if you are running MySQL 4.1.1 or lower, you should not enable full text search; but I guess other than that, it should work for all servers that meet that requirement.

As to to what extend fulltext search is involved, I honestly cannot answer that question, because frankly, I don't know. Judging from the modifications done in search.php, I think this hack did some what touch on the slightly bugged vbulletin fulltext search proble; but whether or not it fixes it, I don't know as I did not test it out myself.

I personally think that merging the two would be an interesting idea, however, I wouldn't be doing that. This is simply because I cannot say that I am familiar enough with JohnWoo's hack, and I only gotten into touch base with this hack a while ago when I applied it on one of my forums. If anyone is interested, I'm sure they can contact 007pig (original author) and make arrangements on merging the two.

Cheers.

[Atsuko]

Hello!

I was taught about this thread from Brad.
I am using VB 3.5.3 and the language is Japanese.
So I have same problem with Chinese when using original VB.

I need help to install your hack to 3.5.3 .

Can someone make a plugin for it?

[HuangA]

Originally Posted by Atsuko

Hello!

I was taught about this thread from Brad.
I am using VB 3.5.3 and the language is Japanese.
So I have same problem with Chinese when using original VB.

I need help to install your hack to 3.5.3 .

Can someone make a plugin for it?

wow, old thread =X

Even though I joined up with vBulletin Chinese briefly after releasing the above, I haven't been doing a whole lot with vB lately (especiall 3.5.x series), so I don't know as to how complicated it'd be to port it over to 3.5.3. Furthermore, I think with 3.5.x series, vBulletin-chinese went ahead and made everything into unicode and hence doesn't have this kind of problem.

With 3.5.x, there is an option to make the search feature to use fulltext search. Again, I don't know to what extend it enables the fulltext search capability (partly because I haven't touched it yet, partly because I haven't looked into the code yet), so I don't know how effective it would be, even if we are still using SJIS/ISO-2022-JP. Have you tried enabling that? Does it improve your search results? This setting is directly under the vBulletin Options setting in the admin cp of your installation. You may wish to enable it on a test environment (IE: A spearate installation with a backup of your existing database so it does not affect your live instance) and see if it achieves your needs.

As an aside note, do you have a complete 3.5.3 Japanese language xml? If you have a complete one (with all the CP language, all the FAQ etc.) or if you have a partial one, and wouldn't mind fall back to English (or another complete one that you have) for the missing phrases, then maybe I can make an unicode copy that utilizes your japanese language xml from the svn. No promises as I need to check with 007 and others, and may need to verify your license status (can still download and can qualify for our unicode release etc.)

[Atsuko]

Dear HuangA,

Thank you very much for you kind answer.
I am sory for being late to write back.
My site is getting growing, last month, we had 100 new registered members.
I realy need to solve this as soon as possible.

I have upgraded to 3.5.3, working with no problem.

Thank you very much for your offer for writing the special file.
It will be very nice of you, but I start to think of buying Chinese version.

So, anyway, I went to Chinese version site, and try to order...

I any how found the form , but could not send it becuase I can not understand requirements.

uhhh,

If you know the chinese version team, would you please inform the mail address which I can ask and order in English.

Thank you!