A broad range of noise words is good, if it keeps the index size down. What’s nasty is that vBulletin’s search function just drops them from your query without notice. :mad:
(“ain’t”? Don’t apostrophes get removed anyway and are treated as a word delimiter?)
FYI, with Tuba’s permission, I am posting a link to the default list of ignored words supplied with Vbulletin’s version 2.2.1. I have extracted this from the php code file badwords.php. Of course, there is no guarantee that the SDMB list is the same, but it’s a good starting point.
Note that “ain’t” and other contracted words are in this list.
Those are bad words? I always thought that “darn” and “shucks” were bad words. Was my mother wrong?
From what I can see, you don’t have a “WWW” button. Arnold Winkleried and White Lightning do, but not you.
wolfstu - the button shows up if you have a homepage listed in your profile. Since it’s dynamic, it doesn’t show up if you remove the homepage listed in your profile.
Yeah, weird. Anthracite used to. I’m sure she had a plenty-good reason for removing it.
I figured as much. But then, why would someone point people toward it, but not actually have it? Did they forget to mention their homepage in their profile?
Oh. um,
Must be. Shoulda thought of that. Never mind. Continue ignoring my rantings.
:: Rants in a corner ::
So when a search with wildcards is executed, is the board software performing a different type of search routine (maybe a brute-force search instead of an index search)? - certainly the wildcard search finds words that (unless the SDMB ‘badwords’ has been modified) aren’t indexed.
Not that I really need to know, but I’m guessing that if it does use a brute force search for wildcards, then the server hit is going to be much more severe, isn’t it?
It’s there now. I removed it temporarily because, on advice of counsel, I was doing major security and tracking enhancements to my Board this weekend, and wanted to slow traffic down as much as possible so I could work easier (my logs show a lot of SDMB people come in via that link each day).
The “*” wildcard can only be used at the end of a word, indicating that the index is still being used in wildcard searches.
Hmm. I searched for “alon*” in ATMB for one month and found this thread, highlighting all the occurrences of “alone”. As expected, “aloneness” in Arnold’s post was also highlighted. Also as expected, “alongside” in a different thread was found, too.
Are you sure about that? :dubious: (<- couldn’t resist) From our very own search page (bolding mine):
Matches to a trailing wildcard can be found simply by reading consecutive entries, in a single sorted index. Searching in it for matches to a leading wildcard isn’t impossible though, but it requires to scan through the whole index because the hits may be scattered all over the place. It’s still a rather efficient index search (i.e. it wouldn’t have to scan the whole post database - just the index), but it already is quite a brute-force method also.
IIRC the search index of this board is(was) about 80 MBytes, so I guess it’s better to avoid scanning through that with a leading wildcard when the server is slow.
rowrrbazzle - I believe the explanation for what you see is this:
when you search for “alon*” you will find threads containing a word starting with “alon” but not the word “alone” since “alone” is in the “bad words” list. However, when the thread is called up, the “highligh=alon*” part of the link will highlight every word starting with “alon” including the word “alone”.
wolfstu go away, that’s my corner. 
[continued rant]What’s really nasty is that they’re carried over to the highlight parameter as if nothing happened, pretending that they’re the reason for the search hit.[/continued rant]
Ah, Dubious got its second colon (like it better too). If a kind mod has the heart to fix mine up there?
So fixed, fem.