hi Matt

i use ipb in chinese system. my web site url is http://bbs.gzeasy.com

i found that i can't use full-text search in chinese . when i turn on full-text search and use Chinese words to keywords the system often return "no match". but when i use english it will be all ok. Of course i can use manual search to find everything. but u know that the manual search use a big server resource. so i hope i can use full-text search to do this. Our board has 2892564 posts..

i found some chinese ipb 's site to mod the ipb so they already can use full-text search in chinese (not in manual search mode). so could you research the chinese full-text function in next release? many thanks

Without checking, I'm pretty sure that's because MySQL doesn't index double byte characters by default.

You are right, Matt. For chinese board, you must turn off the full-text search feature

If you use MySQL 4.1 you can change the table charset. Then the FullText search *should* work. That's what they say in MySQL documentation.

I think Invision Power Board uses UTF-8 by default, however MySQL uses ISO-8859-1 by default.

I think the connection between IPB and MySQL must also be set to use UTF-8, however I'm not sure it's possible if you're connected with the old mysql extention (with mysqli you have lots of new functions for 4.1, and you also have the charset functions).

Anyway it's still a totally new feature. Only people on dedicated server may be able to use that (still lots of hosting companies are using MySQL 4.0 or does not include MySQLi PHP extention). Also it may require changes to IPB (which is probably still using mysql extention) so better keep the FullText search off.