Quote Originally Posted by Pugwash View Post
As far as I have understood it, he's talking about it being in the PHP source code for phpBB. If you don't have r/w access to the phpBB code, you can't change the minimum search length indexed.
It's not, it's in the Admin control panel, under Search Settings. I'm looking at it on one of my BBs right now.

For vBulletin, it's the Search Index Minimum Word Length setting under Message Searching Option.

You may need to modify my.cnf (for MySQL) and add the following for fulltext search:

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3

[myisamchk]
ft_min_word_len=3
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/...variables.html

Default value is supposedly 4, but strangely enough, I'm running a MySQL version that's a few months old, I don't have a specific ft_min_word_len set, and yet it's been indexing correctly as per my 3 character setting in phpBB on that board.

As I said, it's not a PHP limitation.

Anyway, an additional problem is that they'd have to rebuild the search index. Given that this is a fairly busy board, that might not be very fun.