Question about search excluding long words.
 

So I figured I would search to see if there were any threads about Helicomatic hubs, and to see if any references to my username showed up as well. When searching for "Helicomatic" you get this result:

Now I know the hubs are on a whole bunch of old Peugeots, Treks, and others, but how common can it really be as a topic? I guess it's just too long. Searching for "hakkapeliitta" tires gives you a similar result. Why are long search terms blocked?

Time to get the jumper cables and jolt this thread back to life. I was astonished to find that the search fails on words as short as 11 letters. This is an English language site, with content of a mostly technical nature, in the 21st Century. Eleven letters? Seriously?

Total coincidence - it was a failed search on "helicomatic" that pointed me to this thread. I went to this section of the forum and searched on "search long", and this came up.

While it is less than optimal, my current recommendation is to open a shiny new Google tab, and in the address bar paste this:

helicomatic hubs site:www.bikeforums.net

It works.

If by "it works", you mean "it spies on you, yes, it "works". But I digress; any generic search engine does NOT work for the purpose. Such a search provides EVERY reference to the search terms, EVER stored on the specified site, in order of what IT "thinks" is important. No option to search specific sections, let alone search specific threads, or search by user, or order by date. Forget about options like return posts vs. threads, search on thread headers only, etc. These are all features that forum searches have had for decades, and emasculating the search by limiting the number of letters in a word is, well, 20th-Century.

Actually, the search _features_ are pretty cool; as said, it can fine tune your search in ways that a generic search engine can't (simply because it's embedded in the forum app). But such a small word size limit cripples it. Bumping it to, oh, 15 or 16 letters would make a big difference.

Hello all, I looked into this issue with tech and fixed it. @helicomatic , I apologize about that inconvenience.

Looky that, it works! Thanks Ryan.

Anything to make our community happy :)