Yesterday I helped somebody to find a previous thread of theirs by regarding Koi.

I gave them a link to search, including the "Older than 1 day" necessary to make searches work. Yesterday, that search had many results.

Today it has none at all.

Yet, search for goldfish and the first result also has the word Koi.

Are you programming to achieve failure, or function? Looks like failure.

Iknow bagginsbill your tired of hearing it from me but i have it reported.

Have to agree with BB..... Programming for failure... Now, virtually every page on the site goes to a blank page until you hit the refresh icon 2 or 3 times....

No response? 

Here's what I think. The programmer incorrectly assumed three-letter words should be ignored. And - he decided to insult the user by not honestly telling that three-letter words are being ignored. Instead the user is erroneously told there are no matches. 

In the Poser forum, we have numerous important topics that are found by doing a three-letter search. Try any of these - they all produce nothing:

HDR

IBL

IDL

MSR

Refusing to search for these demonstrates a total disregard or total ignorance of the way the Poser forum needs to be used.

I find a lot of searches - for words with more than 3 letters, show no results either.  Then I search on Google for the product and the word Renderosity, and it shows up.

When I search for 3 letter words I get lots of results.  IBL gave me 405 results.  IDL = 173 results.  HDR = 50 results.

Those are store searches. I'm talking about forum searches - you know, where thousands of users look for my posts on technical matters.

I doubt very much that the store search would be permitted to remain broken for more than 8 nanoseconds.

What if, when people use the forum, and there is a 3 letter word that someone may want to search for - like Koi - they type it as 6 letters - like koikoi, iblibl, hdrhdr.  So words like "and", "the", "may", "you", "see" are typed as 3 letters, but subject type words are typed as 6 letters.  I obviously know nothing about computer programming.

With regard to programming the match for words, the length of the word is not important at all. And as can be seen by your store searches, they work fine - just fine.

I don't know if you're an apologist or what. There is no reason for the search to fail. Neither usability nor programming require it.

(Note - I am a programmer - it's what I do for a living.)

We usually discard noise words (such as the, and, etc.) except when they're quoted in a search - then you're expected to find them. Quoting doesn't help here.

This is what I received back guys.

"We are only doing a basic full-text search. Which means that it only searches for words over three characters. It also does not take into account the ‘?’. That why ‘Goldfish’ & ‘Carp’.

To fix we would have to move to cloudsearch."

So I am going to give it my best to get them to push it to the cloud search.

The first fix is to tell the truth to the user. "We can't search for three letter words because we don't know how."

Don't say you found no matches. Say you didn't look.

As for whether you really can't search for three letter words, I doubt that. Most search engines have something like a ""Min characters indexed by search:" field. Otherwise, explain why IBL works for searching your product database, but not your forum database?

Did you use two different engines? Are you saying you "ugpraded" the forum by going to a search engine that can't do what the old one did, or what the store engine clearly can do?

There's quite a lot more to say than what they told you, Tina.

Let's not forget that the 3-letter search did work the day before the last update. Why did you change it to something less capable?

Part of the reason I'm so irritated is that RDNA did the same thing and now you can't find any of these important topics at RDNA, either.

I'm really not enthusiastic about writing thousands of educational posts only to have them lost because nobody can FIND them anymore.

If RDNA remains incompetent, and your management chooses incompetence as well (works as designed - go away baggins) then I will probably do what many are privately asking me to do: make my own forum.

BB, would you be willing to help them with search, in return for some compensation?

I dunno if yer expertise is in this area, but you saw that they were gonna switch to "cloud" if all else fails.

there's one big name in cloud search, but I dunno if that's their choice, in which case they would hafta drop log-in limits to search.

I used to be a programmer myself. Cobol, Rpg sql  and a few other things. I would be fascinated to know what and how they are doing a search. 

Mark,

You_ used some words that are_ too_ small for_ me__ to__ understand. RPG, SQL - what did you say? Whatever you said, it could not have been important.

Also, this is a graphics forum where we do graphics on computers, but please do not use CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, or SSS, IDL, IBL, HDR as any such statement will never be found again by people who are interested in those topics.

I'll throw in my small bit of assistance. If Rendo is using mysql, change ft_min_word_len from 4 to 3, restart the server and rebuild your fulltext indexes. Change any restrictions you may have on the forum level as well.

Glad I found this thread as the 3 letter words littering the poserverse never even dawned on me. I've got HW's forum search rebuilding as I type this (luckily the server itself was already set to allow less than 4 so no fiddling with that).

I did discuss this with the team and at this time it is going to remain this way unfortunately.  The team voiced that a thread shouldn't be less than three or four letters and should really more descriptive going forward.

I have asked the programmer to put this somewhere within the the Subject line so everyone was at least aware.

Lol, this is ridiculous.

I honestly cant believe this one, did anyone consider anything for Daz 3D is unsearchable? (As it doesn't meet the forum min requirements for an actual search). Search for DS tutorials and the "DS" section is ignored. Tut?

Want to find some info relating to a specific file type? Pdf, jpg, pz3, duf. Kind of difficult, if search ignore any file type name as its to short...

Search for "DAZ Studio .duf file" and what is actually searched for is "Studio File". All of the results are irrelevant to the initial search criteria. Like brain surgery with a chainsaw....

Character referencing V4, M6, G5 unsearchable.

Acronyms are an integral part of ttechnical jargon. People are not just going to stop using them.

Good design is form and FUNCTION. Design should meet peoples needs intuitively, if you need to re-educate people to make the design successful. It is poor design imo.

if they allowed search for 3-ltr words, could tie up small server farm with multiple requests.  I've noticed forum pages always load slow on my 125 Mbps conn.

however, just tried google: "the" gets >25 billion results and "koi" gets >82 million, both in <1 sec.

Tina - that is ridiculous. This is a technical forum and these searches worked fine just two weeks ago.

Of course a thread should be longer than three letters - but nobody asked for 3-letter threads. Are you dealing with tiny little pissants or developers?

if they allowed search for 3-ltr words, could tie up small server farm with multiple requests.  I've noticed forum pages always load slow on my 125 Mbps conn.

however, just tried google: "the" gets >25 billion results and "koi" gets >82 million, both in <1 sec.

These searches worked fine RIGHT HERE ON THIS SITE just TWO WEEKS AGO., No - I won't accept that it's a performance issue when it was already working. The programmer is incompetent.

if they allowed search for 3-ltr words, could tie up small server farm with multiple requests.  I've noticed forum pages always load slow on my 125 Mbps conn.

however, just tried google: "the" gets >25 billion results and "koi" gets >82 million, both in <1 sec.

The above could be addressed with caching queries for a a length of time, and other aspects of proper system/database design.  

I did discuss this with the team and at this time it is going to remain this way unfortunately.  The team voiced that a thread shouldn't be less than three or four letters and should really more descriptive going forward.

I have asked the programmer to put this somewhere within the the Subject line so everyone was at least aware.

This sounds familiar-- like back during the last major overhaul when the lead programmer initially refused to change the color of the "Sale" sign because he liked it, even though everyone else here hated it.  I can't remember off the top of my head what color it was other than that it was either glaring or very difficult to see.  Everyone here has made very good points as to why 3-letter search terms are important.  It has nothing to do with "3 letter topic titles" and everything to do with words in those titles, like "HDR", "Tut", "png" "CS6" "pz2" "mc6" "Duf" and "DAZ".
This decision by the programmers of the forum is a VERY VERY bad one-- people are already being driven away by the trolls (esp. one particular one), and now this.  The trolls have gotten bad enough that some people here have even closed their accounts, which includes an end to their shopping on this site primarily due to the forum trolls.  Add on top of that the recent hacking.

It is in the best interest of the programmers of these forums to capitulate to whatever requests or demands that the vast majority of the forumites have within reason-- and bringing back a simple feature that was recently broken is 100% within reason, esp. if refusing to restore it means losing more customers with deep or easily burned pockets. 

I would bet Google builds indexes.

@bill,    used some words that   small  understand.  what  ? Whatever   said, could   have been important.      < huh ;-)

Are searched limited to thread titles ?  I had assumed it was a full text search.

Full text. And it used to work great. I abandoned RDNA and lived here all the time because this site's forum was perfect.

Not any more. It's the worst of all the sites I visit.

o.k., then my vote is to switch to cloud search if site search is slowing things down and not working.