How do I enable wildcard searches?

[Jason Dunn]

I've spent 15 minutes searching on Google, these forums, and the official manual, and I've struck out on what seems like a simple question: how do I enable wildcard searches in my forums?

I've found posts here that reference 2.x structures that don't exist any more, and posts for 3.x that reference going into the usergroup manager and enabling boolean searches, but I can find no reference to "boolean" or "wildcards" in the user group settings.

[Steve Machol]

You will have to upgrade to at least 3.6 to do this.

[Jason Dunn]

Thanks for the quick response Steve, it's appreciated!

You will have to upgrade to at least 3.6 to do this.

I'm running 3.6.9 right now. What's the specific thing I need to look for though? And did I miss it in the manual?

[Steve Machol]

Thanks for the quick response Steve, it's appreciated!



I'm running 3.6.9 right now. What's the specific thing I need to look for though? And did I miss it in the manual?

Then you shouldn't be posting in the 3.0 forum

<Moved>

First, you need to enable fulltext searching:

Admin CP -> vBuletin Options -> Search Type

Then you need to set 'Can Use Boolean Search' to 'Yes' in the Usergroup settings.

[Jason Dunn]

Thanks, got it working now - after my server essentially locked up for an hour running the update. I saw the warning about it taking "10 seconds to an hour", but I didn't realize that also meant it would use up every ounce of CPU and I/O that my server had. I'd love to see that warning be a bit more...blunt.

[Jerz]

Well rebuilding the index is quite an intensive process, which is kind of implied. However I agree it would be nice to add to that message for people who don't quite understand.

[Jason Dunn]

Well rebuilding the index is quite an intensive process, which is kind of implied. However I agree it would be nice to add to that message for people who don't quite understand.

Well, I'm one user who didn't understand what was "implied" - I didn't grasp that it was a full re-indexing of the boards. A clearer warning would be very helpful to those of us who are not yet vBulletin gurus.