PUZZLED:
How can I search for posts on 'VI' if by the new rules (or maybe they are old) I get the messge:
"The search term you specified (vi) is under the minimum word length (3) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer.
If this term contains a wildcard, please make this term more specific.
"
DOHHH??
search for editors....
and u get lot whole vi's...
What do you want to know about vi? You can place multiple words in the search, and get just the answers you want.
The software accepts words longer than 2 characters - doing a search for edit vi grep will still give the error. Even if you quote "vi" you get the error. That is what the person is complaining about.
Here we actually have someone who is willing to search first, and can't!
I think this is something Neo would have to make a call on - 3 letters is probably the default but UNIX has commands with only two letters (cd, vi , ed, ar, at, mt, lp, bc, dd, du, ln ...) which folks may be adding to their search.
The default is 4 letters but we changed it to 3 about a year ago. I think 2 is a bit small and these searches will really hurt performance.
However, let's try it........ I'll change it right now and see what happens 
OK, I changed it to 2 letters and the searches did not work and no results were returned. So, I changed it back to three.
Guess two letter searches just kill the database....
I could understand two-letter searches killing the database if every word containing the letters "vi" were returned; however, since you're only looking for the exact match of "vi" (and nothing containing vi, such as visual, vis, etc) I don't understand why that would hurt performance any more than looking for words that are three letters or more in length...
but I guess if you tried it and it don't work then it just don't work. oh well
The vBulletin software specifically states that making the search criteria smaller results in database performance problems. I think it has to do with how the database is indexed.
I agree that two letter searches are good for this site and will try again.... this weekend and see if it works! I forgot to 'reindex' the search database after changing the minimum search length to two.... we will see what happens ....
Neo
OK, seems to work after rebuilding the database index...... and the size is much bigger, as one would guess......
Let's stick with the 'two letter' search for a while and see how it does......
Thanks for the good suggestion.
Thanks to all, and especially you NEO.
now that we figured out that we can search for 2 letters, how about 1?
^^
Hmm.. and how many one-letter unix commands are there..?
And besides, I'm sure that would kill the system... imagine looking for the letter 'a'... you'd get every post on the site :rolleyes:
We are investigating a new plugin for a zero letter search. The user simply 'thinks' the query ... enters nothing ... hits return ... and then relevant matches appear.
As soon as we get it working, will post a formal announcement 
Is this part of the `.*` zero or more character search initiative?