Forum Search Function

[Johnson Motorwerks]

Hi all,

I was trying to do some research on this forum yesterday and found that using acronyms in "search" is not allowed or possible. Is there a reason for this outside of a site limitation? Being that VAG and all German car makers use acronyms for modules since most of them keep their mother tongue naming scheme it would be nice to be able to search older posts in this manner.

Cheers!

 

[PetrolDave]

How many characters were in the acronyms you were searching for?

 

[Johnson Motorwerks]

Most modules are 3 characters.

 

[DV52]

@Johnson Motorwerks : I suspect that your search string has fallen foul of the "too short" restriction. I don't think that it matters if the term is included in the forum lexicon, or not.

For example, try searching for the term "Bit" which is not a defined-term but which should return lots of hits because of the nomenclature that's used in long-code. It suffers the same fate. However, If you extend the search string to "Bits", there will be hits-a-plenty!

The forum search engine seems to need a minimum of 4 x alpha/numeric characters.

Don

PS: On a different, but related topic - is there a listing of the different modes for searching the forum (i.e. must-have inclusions, or exclusions)?

 

[Uwe]

Work-around: Use an external search engine, e.g.:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=bit+site:forums.ross-tech.com

-Uwe-

 

[DV52]

^^^ haha.....yes it works - but a classic example of a solution that focuses on solving the effect, rather than the cause!!!

So as for my other question - is there a list of the operators that the forum search engine uses for stuff like concatenation, must-include, must-exclude etc?

Don

 

[Johnson Motorwerks]

^^^ haha.....yes it works - but a classic example of a solution that focuses on solving the effect, rather than the cause!!!

So as for my other question - is there a list of the operators that the forum search engine uses for stuff like concatenation, must-include, must-exclude etc?

Don

It appears this is a change that cannot be easily addressed or has been intentionally limited for one reason or another so the more advanced users are relegated to using outside search functions which are sometimes less than ideal. This IMO is unfortunate since the ability to perform a general search for a VAG module or term that has been for all intents and purposes always described by its OEM acronym. This makes searches less helpful since full module naming is hardly ever used by most when posting about diagnosis or repair and it makes finding the useful or pertinent information even more difficult and time consuming then it should.

Just for giggles I used the above mentioned search option (thank you UWE) and found pages of mostly none relevant information but I also tried to find the post that I had made earlier with regards to AFS module using slightly more specific naming details but not the entire title and it still did not show. I also tried finding that same post with a exact copy of the title I used here and it still does not show up and this is after adjusting the search timeline and other criteria.

 

[Santos]

It appears this is a change that cannot be easily addressed or has been intentionally limited for one reason or another....

The limitation comes from the MYSQL database and xenforo. Altering the search character limit will cause stability and performance issues along with increasing the size of the forum. The limitation isnt isolated to RT forums. Other forums using mysql will have the same minimum search character limit. A good example is Tdiclub.com. Try searching tdi , no results will be found.

 

[DV52]

@Santos: I do understand your point and I guess there must be a defined minimum character number limit in any SQL engine to stop the search returning an unusable avalanche of hits.

However, the concept of concatenation variables to SQL strings is not "unusual". Although not an answer to the minimum character limit in a query, these useful little-gems can often be pivotal to focusing the search results so as to avoid stability problems.

I've tried reading the Xenforo forum in an attempt to understand what variables are used in their software - but alas, the dialogue is mostly between professional code-cutters. Don't get me wrong, I envy the ability of code-cutters, but their written language skills are invariably only slightly higher than machine language (no offense intended if you are a code-cutter too)!! Seriously, the Xenforo forum posts are all about arcane programming matters (which is not surprising I guess) - anyhow, its well beyond my feeble intellect!

Is there a simple table listing the concatenation variables that dumb forum users (like me) can include in our search strings? Or, is the only way to do this to abandon Xenforo entirely and use the separate environment of web search engines like Google - as @Uwe reply above suggests (Shirley not)?

Don