forum policy and usability

[thehefi]

Dear Phoca!

First of all: I appreciate your work and support very much!

But...

Looking for an answer to a particular problem, I almost collapsed.
One cannot search without registration. Okay.
So I signed up here with travelling around a lot of protection against bots, which I've never seen before, with (verbal) question and answer and so on. Painstaking, but okay.
Now I am allowed to search - yeah!

But...

Any combination of search terms according to my question results into:

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: ...
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 4 characters and must not contain more than 12 characters excluding wildcards.

If you don't like unnecessary complaints and emails:

1) You offer compnents for common purposes, so you should not ban words like "upload", "download", "picture", ...
2) The second sentence should be eliminated completely. I used a lot of combinations of more than 3 words, each >4 and <12 charcters.

Just my 2 cents.

thehefi

[Jan]

Hi,

yes it is problematic but this is more a question on spammers or phpbb developers.

There are really hard protection methods which mostly affect normal users but without them no forum can be run, because spammers and attackers attack 24 hours per day, 7 days in week persistently.

I didn't specific e.g. the word "download" or "upload", etc. as ban words, the forum made it automatically - there are so much posts with "download" so then it is not possible to display all the feature, so some more words must be specified

BTW: but of course if somebody can help with maintaining the forum, will be great.

Jan