Well of Souls Forums

The Search function should now be working properly without excluding keywords.

And yes, Lerakroxa was a spambot.

I changed the captcha questions, and that appears to have stopped the flood of new spambot registrations. I can only assume that somebody must provide a list of answers for a given site, and that the list is somehow distributed. I don't think any bot could come up with answers on its own; these aren't questions you can Google the answers to.

I've deleted all the new registrations with no posts for the last few days, but there are probably a few which registered earlier that are still waiting to pop up.

Well, it's not working completely.

Trying to find "Erfworld" or "Cameo" using the forum search gives "no result" (*),
using google to find "Cameo" gave the correct post (the one I was looking for) as first result.


(*)
F'in weird.... When checking the provided url's, search suddenly does know "Erfworld" and "Cameo", although 5 minutes before it did not.
But it does not link to the top post, only to my reply... That explains why search does know it now, and not before...
The index is missing apparently quite a few posts.....

The process to rebuild the search index did not complete properly. I'm in the process of trying to fix it.

Why not go all out and try to update to the current version of phpBB?

Might be as much time investment as fixing the search routine, and may have the added advantage of better security...

Anyway, the workaround using your favourite search engine and adding "site:www.well-of-souls.com/forums/" also works fine.
Several forums I visit have issues with the forum search. php is not really made for searches and search databases...

edit: (you seem to have 3.0.9 if I estimate correctly (at least you're newer than that). Which is actually more current than my first guess would've been. So forget what I wrote)

After turning off the "ignore common words" feature, I was unable to successfully rebuild the search index using the default Fulltext native method, even after several tries. I changed the search method to Fulltext mysql and rebuilt the index, and the search function now appears to be working properly. Let me know if you experience further problems with it.