dan kelley wrote:
I want to let my users search for 3-letter queries (which are common for acronyms used in my wiki). Is there some reason for the setting $wgDBminWordLen = 4; in the file DefaultSettings.php and would anything be harmed if I changed that line to assign a value of 3?
I'm a bit reluctant to do this, in case there might be unforseen problems ensuing. (I note that the error message implies not that short search items are prevented by choice, but rather by necessity ... that's why I'm a little scared to change the line without advice.)
This variable is used when running with MySQL 3.x to discard words that MySQL will not return any results for so that they don't nix your entire boolean AND'ed search.
You need to configure MySQL to use a shorter minimum word length in its fulltext index to actually _get_ any results for shorter words.
If you're using MySQL 4.x, then don't bother touching $wgDBminWordLen since it won't be used; just configure MySQL directly.
See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Fine-tuning.html
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)