XF 2.2 How to abbreviate question and answer thread titles and tags since ampersand gets ignored? A way to search special characters?

[MaximilianKohler]

I put "Q&A" in the title and "q&a" as a tag. When I search "q&a" I get 0 results. When I click the "q&a" tag it works, and the URL shows /tags/qa/. But on the "Search -> Tags" page there is no q&a or qa.

I saw that Xenforo changed some search defaults in XF 2.3, but I don't see anything that indicates it "solved" this issue.

Any ideas? "qanda" is not great. "qa" is not great, but seems like the next best option, but for something to be searchable it needs to be at least 3 characters. "qna" is really unclear.

q-and-a and q/a work as tags, but not as search queries. Strangely, both of them result in:

Forum could not perform a search!
The search could not be completed because the search keywords were too short, too long, or too common.

"question-answer" seems to be the only thing that works both as a search and a tag.

Is there a way to make ampersand searchable?

 

[Mr Lucky]

I think if anything most people might search for FAQs

 

[briansol]

mysql fulltext search, by default, is 4 chars and up.
you can set it lower, but it's performance suffers and you'll need to rebuild your index.

Enhanced search with elastic addon is worth it if you have a lot of short phrases to search for.

the reason why tags work is because they don't perform a fulltext search, they perform a like or where query (i'm not sure) on the tag name for a direct match, not parsing through a large varchar/text field.


Not sure this answers your question, but may help explain why it does this.