I was looking for past threads on the American Club, but was unsuccessful because every search I tried (and I tried several variations) always indicated “ignored term: american” and only gave me results for the keyword “club.”
Why?
I don’t really know anything about software, or this software, but I think it ignores or rejects certain common words, maybe based on the idea that if the software were to execute a search for those common words, it would either attempt to produce too many documents or actually produce them, which might be too much of a burden for it and might create some kind of problem. My knowledge of these kinds of things is scant and blurry, though, so maybe that’s not the reason.
Sometimes if I can’t find something using the search function, I use Google, by typing site:forumosa.com, plus whatever search terms I want to use.
Here are some threads/posts that mention the American Club (I got these using Google):
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopi … =39&t=4348
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?p=394646
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?t=31475
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopi … 63&t=75015
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopi … 31#p119831
forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopi … 31#p314031
Maybe these threads/posts don’t have what you were looking for, but you might be able to use more specific search terms on Google than I did.
Hope this helps.
Charlie Jack
Yes, I imagine that to be the reason too, but it is irritating; one cannot search for ‘learning Taiwanese’ in the Learning Chinese forum, for instance, and the Google search method doesn’t help much there because it can’t specify searching only LC and only thread titles. As a result, this mod has modified some of the relevant thread titles to include ‘Minnan’ and ‘Hokkien’ to give future searchers something to work with, and Taffy and I have built up an organized index of topics which is stickied in LC, which includes threads relevant to learning Taiwanese.
It would be nice if a user could override the exclusion of common terms when running a search, though – then efforts like the above wouldn’t be necessary.
Yeah, I once tried the Google search using site:forumosa.com plus the remainder of the URL up to the thread number, or maybe it was the forum number, but anyway, no dice. If I recall right, Google just pulled up tons of Forumosa URLs without regard to which thread or forum number it was. 
That sounds like a great idea. You and Taffy are cool for doing that.
Considering my low level of knowledge about computer-related stuff, and how slow I am, I doubt I’ll ever learn enough about software to be able to do something like that. . . .
It’s not doing that for me. If I search for American Club, I get posts containing American and posts containing Club. Some of the results indeed contain the phrase “American Club”.
Try it again. You’ll see that your recent posts on the subject come up at the top.
Yes one can. I just did it. The results included some with only the word “Taiwanese”, and some with only the word “learning”, but quite a few with “Learning Taiwanese”.
Perhaps what you mean is that you can’t search for a phrase as such? That is a pity; it seems strange that the phpBB developers didn’t make the search function more useful this time round. In theory I suppose the Search for all terms or use query as entered option should at least weed out those results which don’t match all of the search terms, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.
I entered ‘Taiwanese’, selected Learning Chinese, search thread titles, return threads, and got no results but this:
I entered ‘Learning Taiwanese’ and got results, but if you look closely, the term ‘Taiwanese’ was actually ignored in the search process, and the fact that some results are relevant to Taiwanese is coincidental, as I have recently bumped those threads. Do it again, and pay attention to the 2nd line:
Try searching for posts with the term learning Taiwanese. You’ll see that both learning and Taiwanese are highlighted. I see that it doesn’t work for topic titles, though.
joesax, I think you’ve got a different search capability than the rest of us, somehow. I still have the same problem coming up with “ignored: american” when searching for [american club]. I also get “ignored: taiwanese” when searching for [learning taiwanese].
Is there some kind of hidden setting that makes the difference?
It helps to describe every option that you’ve changed from the default, so that we can communicate better.
I have searched for learning Taiwanese, in the Learning Chinese forum, selecting return topics, and still got the ‘ignored: taiwanese’ message. That was both with and without changing the first option just under the search terms line.
However, if I select ‘return posts’, which is generally not useful when searching for topics based on common words (you get far too much to sift through), then [color=#008000]yes, as joesax says, it highlights Taiwanese in the resulting posts.[/color] [color=#4040FF]However, it apparently did not select those post results based on that word, as it still displays the ‘ignored Taiwanese’ message. It brings up, I believe, posts with ‘learning’, but then highlights both the used search term ‘learning’ and the ignored search term ‘Taiwanese’. [/color]The top thread with ‘learning’ is only coincidentally on Taiwanese because it happens to the most recently active topic in LC.
I had to manually scroll through every page in the Learning Chinese forum in order to actually identify, bump and organize stuff on this and a couple other topics (it was previously such a mess that it was hard even for mods to identify which thread questions about, for instance, where to study should be merged with). This is stupid, because even common words are not so common when you restrict them to topic titles and specific fora. If there is any way to override such a restriction it would be a valuable toggle to add.
From googling around, I get the impression that this is an Internet-wide problem, and one not connected to a particular type of bulletin board software (I’d love to find out that I’m wrong about the latter, to find out that there’s a bulletin board software somewhere out there that has a very good search function, or better yet, that there’s a very good search function software that can be added to a bulletin board without reinstalling the board’s software).
I don’t think it’s ‘internet-wide’. You can easily Google for “Taiwanese” or “American”. I imagine that when this BBS’s software is asked to compile search tables, it runs a frequency analysis and cuts off the most common words, whatever they might be, so that using the same software on a BBS in Croatia, the word “Taiwanese” would not be chosen as a search term to be excluded.
Sorry, I got a little off-topic. I meant general problems with bulletin board search functions.
[Edit:]I just googled around some more, and it looks like there aren’t that many general search function problems either. So I was wrong, and I withdraw all my prior statements about search functions. 
[End edit]