Search Feature

[Mikey]

Why is there a restriction on short words. Short words aren't always common words. Not necessarily. Like "ram"?

[Lhadatt]

I know. It's a trade-off between the number of search terms we can have vs. database size. Why let you search for "ico" when the forum software has to index all three letter words to get that rare term?

[cka]

Search word length can be adjusted, but it's not very suitable for words that have =< 3 letters. Cause then it'll index everything in the database more or less and the search tables will be ginormous. Certain words can be added to bypass the short word length, but really there aren't that many 3 letter words that pertain to titles of games and shit.

[Mikey]

Is there not a subset of really common 3 letter words like "and" and "the" and "any" that you could simply exclude? Names and things like "ico" would be far less common in comparison.

It's not a huge problem but it's weird when it tells you a word is too short even if it's not a common word.

[cka]

There's no exclusion list, but there's an inclusion list...
Besides, AND is a reserved keyword for boolean searches, and everyone spells the 'teh'.

[Mikey]

OK, that's all I gotta say on that matter.

On a separate issue, very often when I use "back", "forward" or "refresh" in the forums the page I get is messed up, being all white, having very little formatting and a bunch of broken HTML fomatting code on top. Like the formatting of the page is broken. Is that because I'm using the browser's history to go back and forward instead of clicking on the links back to a forum and making the page reload properly? Would that be a more correct way to browse?

[cka]

That's probably a problem with your webbrowser. Try to F5 (refresh, reload) it and see if that fixes the html rendering. It could be a premature port close from downloading stuff pertaining to the page (such as images, etc.) and stopping the html renderer before it finishes rendering the webpage.

[Mikey]

I just pressed F5 and it did it again. Hitting F5 another time doesn't cure it either. The page appears wrong with that broken code at the top and a white background then proceeds to load normally with text and buttons. A similar thing happens at the shmups forum (gamespy hosted I think) but there clicking back produces complete textual garbage on a black background. But clicking the link to a thread makes it load fine. So it's probably a browser thing. It's Explorer on Windows after all.

[sggg]

So it's probably a browser thing. It's Explorer on Windows after all.

You need Opera!

[MechDeus]

Certain words can be added to bypass the short word length, but really there aren't that many 3 letter words that pertain to titles of games and shit.

REZ!