Yes % _ ? and . are also common metacharacters. I think it would worth charging the minum word length. But then I don't know the full picture. For Chinese, full text search is not a useful feature. In the Phorum config file, ft_search can be disabled, making the search for Chinese a lot more useful. For 'nobody', you are looking at a MySQL quirk. MySQL full text searching does make use of a list of stop words. The stop words are not included in the search data by default. For a list of stopwords see this MySQL manual page. The administrator of the MySQL server can disable the stop word behavior by using the following in the my.cnf configuration file: [mysqld] ft_stopword_file = "" After setting this option and restarting the MySQL server, the search index needs to be rebuilt. In the admin interface, there is an option for that below the database integrity menu item. After rebuilding the search index, searching for 'nobody' or other stop words should work as well. Futhermore, note that MySQL also uses a max word length for full text indexing. Words that are shorter than this length are ignored as well. If you have troubles searching for short words, then the MySQL server admin can set ft_min_word_len= 2 for example to use a different minimal word length. A server restart + search index rebuild operation are needed for this too. When you have no willing MySQL admin at hand, then you can always switch to non-full-text search in the Phorum config file. Note however that for a big board this might slow down the search speed.