When I try to search for the word "tutorial" or "Inkscape" (or any other word) I always get the same result page saying the following:

"The following words in your search query were ignored: inkscape.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards."

The following happens whe using the advaced search, or the search located in the top right of the pages...

I believe it is working. With most indexing If a term appears too frequently then it becomes irrelevent. So far we don't have many topics and almost all of them would contain the term "Inkscape" and many would have "tutorial". Try searching for "png2ico" or "'blend" to see that it is working.

It is just the indexing thing but your forum indexes way too much. I was having trouble changing the color of the text in a text box so i searched the help forum for 'text color' and both of those words word ignored. So I tried "text color", actually putting it in quotes but it still said both words were ignored. I understand that text and color are very common words but they shouldn't get blocked out if you use quotes for an exact phrase. Now since you're using phpBB not a forum you made yourself I understand that u may not be able to fix it without having to learn all the internals of phpBB in order to mod it, so it may just be easier to reduce to indexing or turn it off. I don't think you need that level of indexing anyway. If someone searches for color and text sure they'll probably get 100 or so results but thats their problem and if they don't like it they can do a more specific search.

Yeah I just ran some test searches and this really is a huge problem. I searched for "how to change text color", "how to change font size" and "how to select paths", all in quotes for exact phrase. The only words that weren't ignored were font and paths. Path is ignored. Fortunately I figured out how to change text color on my own otherwise I'd be really mad right now that I can't search the help forum for what I need. You had better either mod phpBB so that it supports exact phrase searching, get a better forum system, or just turn indexing off completely cuz it's doing way more harm than good.

Shirokage wrote:You had better either mod phpBB so that it supports exact phrase searching, get a better forum system, or just turn indexing off completely cuz it's doing way more harm than good.

If there were a way to improve this, I'm sure the team of phpBB developers would have implemented it--they would certainly know more about the search code than me.

But I can add a Google search option, which would be overall superior.

I just searched the phpBB.com support forums and it is a problem with phpBB. According to this topic: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=1531095&p=9140315&hilit=search+exact+phrase&sid=dec25bccc6d6f942fd29184ec2627010#p9140315 phpBB's "Native search" only indexes words and can't handle exact phrases whereas if you use the mysql fulltext search it handles exact phrases. The guy also said that his mysql search was limited at words four characters or more but he indicated it was a limit set by his host provider so that may not be a problem. But using google search instead could work too i'm sure.

Thanks for the quick response time on this. It's great to see a support forum with an admin who helps quickly.

To be honest, I had really looked at the search options in phpBB. I knew their were two methods and I was using the Native search by default. I haven't seen any discussions of the pros/cons of Native versus MySQL. I suspect the pros of the Native search is that you can configure parameters that you may not be able to do with MySQL. And then the con is that you can't search for phrases.

I've seen now that I can actually change the threshold of common words, or even completely turn it off so it has no effect at all. But I think a Google search will still be far better. But if I'm going to do it, I want to do it properly, so it might take me a while to put it in place (I would like to take advantage of the API to do something inline).