Concerning the Search Function

Ol'random · 2021-12-01 07:24:22 PM

Hey, I was wondering if it is possible to reduce the amount of characters required for a search on the forums? It seems it requires 3 characters or more to count as a 'keyword'. If possible, could it please be shortened to 2 characters? That way, people, myself included, could search up 'TP' or 'LP' to pull up everything that has those letters in the title.

I'm trying to find all the forum posts for all the different TPs so I can add them to the TinyPlot list on the wiki, and this would make my life a bit easier XD

aeysin · 2021-12-22 12:33:26 PM

Whoops, not sure how I didn’t see this request

I will look into it and see if it’s changeable. There may be a security or resource reason why it’s set to 3+ characters.

aeysin · 2021-12-22 03:44:00 PM

So looks like the min character limit for search queries on the forum is set for good reason.

Reducing the limit from 3 to 2 puts a lot of extra stress on the database. I know we're a small community, but tinkering with the minimum could open the server up to an unintentional ddos

I dumped the DB into text to run some examples. You can see the huge results change from "lp" to "lon".

"LP" isn't a very common letter combo, but still hits ~11.5k times, because it includes things like "scalp", "help", "malpractice".

The wiki, however, does allow for shorter search terms. You may want to search there for info on old TPs. It's a lot more powerful than the software running the forum, and its DB is structured to handle things that the forum cannot. I know you've been active in updating and adding to the wiki, and that rules! I'd hoped more folks would be comfortable with using it. It's way superior to the forum for cataloging and organizing content.

Ol'random · 2021-12-22 04:30:57 PM

Thank you for the answer and i didn't think about the database load or the letter combinations - I was focused on page titles. As for the wiki, I have been looking through all the old TPs and trying to collect them all in one place (at a snail's pace of course); I also wanted to try and start importing stuff from these forums onto the wiki more and the TPs seemed like a good start.

I think I may have spoiled myself with the wiki search function because yeah, it works waaaaaaay better XD

Edit: another thought. Would it be possible to restrict 2 letter searches for topic/page titles only? if not, I understand and I can make use of the ol' ctrl+f

Last edited by Ol'random (2021-12-22 04:37:03 PM)

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#1 2021-12-01 07:24:22 PM

Concerning the Search Function

#2 2021-12-22 12:33:26 PM

Re: Concerning the Search Function

#3 2021-12-22 03:44:00 PM

Re: Concerning the Search Function

#4 2021-12-22 04:30:57 PM

Re: Concerning the Search Function

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