Sorry Guys... Options

[Coomer]

Hey,
I just thought I'd let you guys know what I've been doing so you don't think I'm just lazy. I've been trying to get three-letter search phrases to work, but I've found out some bad information.

The three-letter search phrase is a limitation of MySQL(the site's database software) itself, and not Invision Power Board.

From this link, I found the following:

The minimum and maximum length of words to be indexed is defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables (available as of MySQL 4.0.0). See Section 5.2.3, “Server System Variables”. The default minimum value is four characters. The default maximum depends on your version of MySQL. If you change either value, you must rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes. For example, if you want three-character words to be searchable, you can set the ft_min_word_len variable by putting the following lines in an option file:

So the options are as follows:

Convince my host to change this value to three. This probably won't happen, as it'd be a huge performance hit on their servers.

Convert to manual searching. This method is slower, and doesn't work very well on large boards? Remember how bad the search got before the forum upgrade? That was because of manual searching with our large database. I just tried it out, and a search for "+Celica" didn't even return any results. So this really isn't an option.

Buy a dedicated server, and configure MySQL myself. There are huge costs associated with this option though. Probably anywhere from $140-200 per month, and I just can't justify that for a website like this, seeing as how managed shared hosting works fine now except for a couple configuration issues.

So I think we're pretty much stuck without three-letter search phrases.