Symphony.

It’s not possible to search for numbers in the website forums using the forum search. I was looking for Bauhouse ‘Fluid 960 Grid System’ thread and entered 960 in the search field.

Turns out it’s not possible to search using numbers as search phrases at all. I don’t know if this belongs to the Website Issues or Symphony Issues, so feel free to move it to where it belongs.

This is an odd one. It is quite possible that MySQL does not index numbers, thus making it impossible to search for them in isolation. I’ll do a bit of research, but it is likely there is nothing we can do easily.

This could be related to MySQL’s default FULLTEXT setting that limits its indexing to words of 4 characters or more. Searching for words shorter than this and you don’t get anything, regardless of whether it’s text or numeric.

I believe the minimum word limit can be changed in the MySQL config, but will likely place more strain on the database server since it will need to index the “useless” conjunctions, pronouns etc.

However, in the technical domain where we have so many abbreviations and acronyms flying around, shortening the limit to three characters might be beneficial.

Similarly there is also a bug or feature request to implement a form of boolean search. Not sure how easily this can be done. Might be already supported.

http://getsymphony.com/discuss/thread/20493/5/#position-81

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/server-system-variables.html#sysvar_ft_min_word_len

Pending #121 Improved Search.