So I hear the forum search has been busted for a while. Could someone give me a run down of the flaws?

It probably just needs reindexing. This will take hours of computer time, but I can consdier giving it a shot tomorrow.

Sandy

New index started. It's averaging 15 posts per second, which means it'll take over two hours to complete.

I changed the index settings to solve some of the problems previously experienced:

Enable fulltext updating: Yes
Updating of fulltext indexes when posting, overridden if search is disabled.

Min characters indexed by search: 3
Words with at least this many characters will be indexed for searching.

Max characters indexed by search: 40
Words with no more than this many characters will be indexed for searching.

Common word threshold: 25%
Words which are contained in a greater percentage of all posts will be regarded as common. Common words are ignored in search queries. Set to zero to disable. Only takes effect if there are more than 100 posts.

Sandy

I think that should help. Many of the words I am searching for were filtered.

thanks Sandy.

It's definitely better.

I just ran the same search that originally made me realize the search function was a problem, much happier this time around.

It's been going for about 2.5 hours now, and is about 65% done. Another hour and a half, perhaps.

Sandy

The indexing crapped out while I was away from the computer yesterday evening, but I was able to continue and complete it this morning. Everything should be good to go. Let me know if there are any searches that don't seem to be working.

Sandy

I'm going to try something new to fix the forum search. It may take a number of hours to complete and searching probably won't work very well during that time. I'll post here when it's complete.

Sandy

Well, that was quick. Try it out. Please let me know in this thread if any of your searches fail. I would like to get this working well.

Sandy

I've searched the forum (!) for some threads about the busted search feature, and tried some of the previously problematic searches:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8929: pyramorphix, 4x4x4, skewb, skewb ultimate
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8847: dino, rainbow, void cube
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2369: black milliput

All worked very well, and very fast. Common words things like "cube" and "puzzle" seemed to work perfectly too. It also seems like posting messages has been sped up quite a bit because of the new index being used.

Yay me!

Sandy