virtualbox.org

Any idea why when I search the forum -- e.g. USB, or my handle oao -- I get an empty result?

You cannot use words with less than 4 characters in the forum search function.
Just use Google and add "site:forums.virtualbox.org" to your search terms.

hhhmmm, that's odd. I have not seen such a limitation in any other forum -- is there a reason for it?

I want to search a specific forum -- won't your suggestion search all forums?

You can filter to any URL. This forum for example has an ID of 2, so if you add that part in the filter, it will search in all topics in this forum part. But why limit to only one part? For all you know, it's right in the VirtualBox FAQ.

Thanks.

But wouldn't it be easier for everybody if any search would be possible here?
Is there a particular reason this cannot be changed?

What do you mean? If you use a site filter with Google, like from the index here, all subforums will be searched too. Everything on this forum is indexed by Google and will give a result if your query matches.

I mean that then I have to specify the forum, while if the forum search allowed searches by strings longer than 3 I would not have to. or am I missing something here?

Sorry, but it won't work. The reason phpBB search ignores three characters and less is because of the abundance of words with that few characters. Google has a more efficient search engine. Though, I just tried to filter only for this section, didn't work. But like I said, sometimes the answer is in other sections.