Search Allow Searches for (no prefix) with no other conditionals
 

As per this bug report from a user of our forums, I'm posting this in the Suggestions area. The issue is amply described there:

Quote:
VBulletin Ver 3.7.4, though I haven't seen the issue addressed in any of the update notes for newer version. In fact I tested on this site, with 3.8.2, and found the same behaviour.

If you search for a specific prefix, you get the expected result and get all threads with specified prefix, however; if you try to search for all threads without a prefix you get the following message:
Quote:
Please specify some words or valid user names to search on. There were no matches for those that you specified.
This is irritating if you have a forum where all threads start without a prefix, and have one applied when the content of the thread has been dealt with. To find threads that haven't been dealt with you have to manually go through page by page to get to them.

Thanks,

Squid
I will provide a few examples for why this functionality will be useful.

We have a forum called Reports, in this forum our Site Moderators review the reports that are sent by users and take action accordingly. Due to the size of our forums, it is possible, even if unlikely, that multiple pages of reports are generated in a short time frame and some slip under someone's eye. We have two prefixes in this forum, [Action Taken] and [No Action Taken] to specify that a report has been handled and how it was handled. Now for a moderator who goes into the Reports section, if they were able to do a quick search for all threads in this area that have no prefix, it would give them any that may have slipped through the cracks that they can then deal with.

The same applies to our Announcements area, where announcements are labeled with [Release], [Preview], and [Beta]. Any Admin can thus easily sift through the announcements and label any that have not been labeled, so that users find all results when they search for the prefix they are looking for.

It is applicable elsewhere as well, in much the same way. Now the problem that was offered for implementing a no condition search for threads with (no prefix) is it could be intensive. I would personally be fine if there was a way to force search results for a search of this nature to only return the first 50-100 results, or, alternatively, allow admins to enable them for specific usergroups/forums if they think this could be an issue. All searches can be intensive though, plenty of which are coded into vBulletin, such as the ability for users to search for 1 character if it is not made to be more than 1 in the ACP. So allowing the customer-admin to decide with tools to limit this as the character minimum limits is ideal.