Many users search for common 3 letter words on my forums, it'd be nice to have a feature to include those words in search despite the character limit. :thumbsup:

Fulltext searching doesn't allow it. Period. Regardless of what you allow or disallow.

You can change your search method over to manual, and set the word limit to 3 characters, and you can support 3 char searches that way. But no matter what changes we make, fulltext indexes (unless you reconfigure mysql and rebuild your fulltext indexes) simply do not support 3 character words out of the box.