If you go to the search, there are certain words that come up with "no suitable matches found" even though people have said those words loads of times on the board. Let me give you an example.
search.php?keywords=thanks&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=posts&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

When you type in the word "thanks" into search keywords, it came up with no matches found (well, on my screen), but if you go to the topic below
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=64985

The fifth post on the first page has that word. Does anyone know why it comes up with "no suitable matches found?" Have people said that word so many times that there are too many for the search to find? Do the site owners not want those words to show in search? Is it a bug?

I can understand why thanks wouldn't come up because it is such a common word. Kind of a pain in the ass if you are looking for words that are less than 4 letters though.

Almost every thread has "thanks" in it, so it's not weird that it's not included. A lot of unnecessary resources spent, and a lot of unnecessary results shown.


Can't search for "dio" or "udo" for example.

That's because words less than 4 letters don't show in search

Yes. Thank you for pointing that out, we never realised.

Yes I know you realized! I wasn't quite sure if Megadeth did or not. If he did, then ignore that post.

The post you replied to quoted a comment that said exactly what you did. I'm pretty sure he knew.

Yeah, I hadn't read it properly. Never mind though.

There's a feature (that can be changed) with phpBB3 that will exclude words that it considers "common" from the search index. This feature exists for performance reasons; the backend of the forum search is framed by an index which, if too bloated, will slow down ALL searches immensely (as it analyzes the whole search index for each search query) and possibly lag the forum as a whole (given the amount of time it might take for the forum to retrieve that query). Without this feature, if someone was to look up "that" in the search query, there would be many 100s of thousands of results, and the query to the forum database for that search would take a very long time, and would result in a very broad selection of topics. At present, and by default, the forum software considers "common words" to be those that are in at least a majority of posts; which, for the forum's standards, even the term "metal" which is searchable only comes up with ~200000 queries (less than a quarter of all posts). It's probably for the best that we keep this feature as is. Besides, there's very little logical reason a person would be looking up "thanks" in the forum; it is hoped that the forum search function would be primarily used to find information on metal bands/releases/etc, or on individuals and their posts, and less on very broad and ambiguous terms.

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that this is the same reason why there is a limit on characters.