Allow searching for 3 letter words in RMBs

[[violet]]

The reasoning behind this is quite simple. Most regions and orgs have a 3 letter acronym, but because of that we cannot search for mentions of them on RMB posts as the search is limited to 4 letters minimum.

Granted, there's probably a technical limitation involved that makes searching for short words very expensive, however I believe that it would be very useful to be able to search for acronyms, as it helps grasp the political landscape more easily by knowing which region said what about another region or organization.

[Ainin]

Failing that, it'd be at least nice for a search to return an error message reading "Query must be four characters" instead of the current "No results", which is usually demonstrably untrue and baffling for anyone who hasn't heard of this restriction.

[Bedetopia]

Looks like a bump is needed. [violet] saw it but I'd like to have a techie tell whether or not it's possible or if it's low priority or something else.

[Imperium Anglorum]

Failing that, it'd be at least nice for a search to return an error message reading "Query must be four characters" instead of the current "No results", which is usually demonstrably untrue and baffling for anyone who hasn't heard of this restriction.

Speculating, but probably, on the back end, the system indexes only if words have more than four characters. That's why there are no results.

[[violet]]

That's correct.

It's a reasonably big project to test & benchmark what happens when we allow 3-character words, so while it's worth doing, I can't promise I'll get to it soon.

[Bedetopia]

That's correct.

It's a reasonably big project to test & benchmark what happens when we allow 3-character words, so while it's worth doing, I can't promise I'll get to it soon.

What if, instead of all 3 letter words, you only indexed acronyms? You could make a thread for new ones to be proposed.

[Trotterdam]

What if, instead of all 3 letter words, you only indexed acronyms? You could make a thread for new ones to be proposed.

How would the game know what's an acronym? People can come up with new ones at any time.

More viable would be to allow all 3-letter words except for certain banned words like "the" and "and".

[Bedetopia]

What if, instead of all 3 letter words, you only indexed acronyms? You could make a thread for new ones to be proposed.

How would the game know what's an acronym? People can come up with new ones at any time.

More viable would be to allow all 3-letter words except for certain banned words like "the" and "and".

Even these could be acronyms though. I don't think the system is case-sensitive.

[Trotterdam]

[violet] will have to decide if it makes enough of a difference on efficiency that banning certain words is worth it.

However, like you say, searching is case-insensitive, so either you allow both the word "the" and an acronym that looks like it, or you allow neither.