[Tip] Search for 3 letter words by wrapping with asterisks (ie. for bug use *bug*)

Digital Doctor

Well-known member
I stumbled upon a method of searching for 3 letter words here at xenforo.com

Forinstance if you try to search for:
bug

you'll get this error.
XenForo Community - Error
The search could not be completed because the search keywords were too short, too long, or too common.
however ....
*bug*

bug*
works ! (demo)
Hope that helps :)

Update: I see Forsaken mentioned this tip as well :)

3 letters do not work due to MySQL requiring a minimum of 4. You can bypass this by doing CMS* which will display results.
 
i realized we can search the word "IP" in xenforo.com
how was that possible if theres a 3 letter limit?
 
oh i see.
whats the tradeoff of setting the min word length in my.cnf to zero?
will the mysql load usage increase?
 
Well it would certainly take more resources (memory and disk space) on your server the lower you set the min word length to, but not remarkably so. Personally, I stick with 3 character minimum because I don't really find a lot of 2 letter words I need to search for, and there are a LOT of them ("is", "it", "an", etc.) that creates a pretty big index. But I'm also dealing with 17,000,000+ posts, (and a ton of other searchable content types... PMs, users, etc.)

So in my case, the benefit of a 2 character minimum word length isn't greater than the resources required to maintain it, so I just forgo it.
 
Top Bottom