On vBulletin you can specify certain 3 character phrases which are allowed to be searched, despite the search term minimum length being 4. At the moment, on this forum, I can't search for any topic with "SEO" in the title, which seems pretty limiting.

This is a limitation of MySQL fulltext searching. We are keeping this in mind for 4.0, but it's not something we can just "enable" here. It would require (at present) changing the MySQL configuration and rebuilding fulltext indexes on all tables that have them.

Have you ever considered using Sphinx for the community forums? Or would that not be an option either?

Have you ever considered using Sphinx for the community forums? Or would that not be an option either?

Yes, we have used Sphinx here in the past and do occasionally enable it. As this site is also showcase for the product however, we feel it is important to present it in a stock configuration.

then make sphinx stock.

problem solved

LOL :P

I know, can't as not everyone can run sphinx.