Search Won't Work

[Acorn]

When I try to search for anything on my phpbb3.0.3 site I get the same response:
The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: games.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

I have a number of mods installed, but I tried reverting to new search.php files and that made no difference. I have no idea where else to look for the problem. Can anyone help?

Site is http://www.i-church.org/publicforums
Template is prosilver based
Mods (off the top of my head):
Announcement centre
User Blog Mod/ userlist/ front page display
Instant redirects for ACP and posting
Topic Titles

[Brf]

The error message says you are searching for "games" when you are searching for something else?

[Acorn]

No, whatever I search for the result says that the word is too common or too short or suggests that I haven't entered a word, even when I know the word is on the site either a few times or many times.

[Brf]

I just did a search for "vicar" on your board and it worked just fine.

[Acorn]

OK, now I'm really confused. 'Vicar' works for me too, but 'games', which is on the site 5 times according to Google, and 'Prayer', which is there about 100 times, give me the same result as in the OP. Why? How (and where) are the common words defined?

[Brf]

Your "Neverending Hymn Game" topic has 127 posts. That is over 10% of your board's posts.

[Acorn]

Ahh - I see. Thanks very much.

I think I might change the wording to make it clear that it means that the word appears a lot on the site. I assumed that by 'common' words it meant 'a', 'the', 'and' etc.

[Brf]

Actually, it is explained pretty well on the Search Settings page:

Common word threshold:
Words which are contained in a greater percentage of all posts will be regarded as common. Common words are ignored in search queries. Set to zero to disable. Only takes effect if there are more than 100 posts.

[Acorn]

I should probably have found that , but it won't help members who think the search isn't working!

[Brf]

As the description says, you can set the threshold to zero. Then rebuild your search index. Then you should not have that problem anymore.