Lack of interest Enhance the search in Search Forum nodes

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Wildcat Media

Well-known member
While trying to set up some search forums, I realized that the search terms entered for the title are taken literally:

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We have several cases where we want to feature discussions on a popular person who might belong to a group, yet we can only use one search term here.

For example, if someone has a unique first name, a forum member might only use that person's first name in the thread title. Others might use the surname. Still others might refer to the name of a group the person belongs to.

The problem with using prefixes is that we only allow staff to assign prefixes; therefore, having a moderator continuously monitor threads for new posts and add prefixes is a necessity, and that also does not include 20-25 years of existing posts. Similarly, given past abuses, we do not allow users to use tags. And even if we did, so few would use them that, again, we'd have to resort manual editing to add those tags. The Search Forum solves this by doing a search on the thread title and updates the contents of that node each time the cron runs.

My suggestion is to change this so that we can use operators or at the very least, multiple search terms. Using OR, AND, and "quotes" to specify what we want is helpful, with OR being the default. To use an example, we might use search terms like: john OR smith OR "john smith" OR "smith college" to get the results we need.
 
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Can you expound upon this?
My example shows what I'm after, but I could have made it clearer.

In essence, I want the option to be able to use OR and "phrase" searches, without using tags or prefixes (which members do not have access to, due to past abuses), and without having to manually edit thread titles to make it work.

I could use cars as an example. I might have one forum for electric vehicle talk. If I wanted to have a search forum pick up any EV that Kia currently produces, the Kia EV6 or Niro EV, I would need all three to be search terms as I wouldn't trust members to use a good title. In this case, I could have "Kia" OR "EV6" OR "Niro" OR "Niro EV" as search terms to catch all of them. The way it is now, I could only search on one of those, far as I can tell. Likewise if I did the same with Hyundai, I would want to use "Hyundai" OR "Ioniq 5" OR "Kona EV" so we could gather all forum activity for these terms in one Search Forum.
 
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