There is search in the topic.
In user settings go to default user settings section and there should be an option to turn it on.
Each user can also change that setting in his user settings (there is a section with search settings)
It's not ideal, as it doesn't highlight the searched word and just takes you to the post it was found.
And as PitaJ said - you can improve the search, but you need to change the search engine from standard db search - as it just can't do what you want it to.
There is a solr plugin and unfortunately unmaintained elasticsearch one (So it might not work anymore). But I think you need to install solr and elasticsearch first to actually provide them with their backend.
If there is some light search engine better than database internal search, perhaps making a plugin with it and installing it by default would be better. But I didn't really look into internal search engines so no idea if that's possible or a good idea for default install.
EDIT: after a quick google search I found lunr.js (and elasticlunr that is supposed to be just lunr with some more functions), and flexsearch as node-based alternatives to solr. No idea if they make sense for this application, but I might try looking into a plugin using one of them after I finish with some other projects (so probably a month from now or more).
@oplik0 thanks, unfortunately we cannot use in topic search since our forum is paginated. Currently, it is showing the same result as it would show you do 'find function of the browser', unfortunately this way is not useful for us.
Thanks for "solr" recommendation, we have actually tried that before in our development forum, but somehow it wasn't working (right now I could not remember what the problem was), but we will look into that further to see if we can use it.
Update for #3 hashtag system!
We found this plugin for hashtags:
It replaces tags system in NodeBB, and does search with the hashtag. We are still testing but so far looks ok. I think @Andrea-Dragotta made it, so thanks Andrea... we were looking for something like this...
I suggest this should be an intrinsic property of NodeBB, old tag system should be replaced with modern hashtag system where hashtags can be written anywhere in the text and turn blue, and can be searched as tags.
The search works worse with postgres than with mongodb. Not all words are found. I checked on two identical test forums with different databases.
Partial search does not work on autocomplete with both databases.
Although this plugin can be considered the most important on the site
@volanar Perhaps Apache Solr is the droid you're looking for for use with PostgreSQL? Non trivial to get set up but does a dandy job. I am unsure about status of nodebb solr plugin. @sharonyue uses it with her stuff, I do believe. I recall she had a couple challenges but iirc eventually got it working. Maybe ping her?
Edit: Ah, I'd not read the entire thread prior to posting and now note @oplik0 has previously pointed to solr. I'd avoid Elastic Search plugin even if it did work.
@gotwf Thanks, I will definitely try. More critical for me is the hidden search button in the mobile view. The search button should be visible in the top menu. It's hard to find her now My friends were testing the site and couldn't find the search button. Now more than 80 percent of traffic comes from mobile devices and this is critical.
@volanar Cool. Be aware that Solr, being a Java app, is a bit fatter than NodeBB. I ran on dedicated vm during my experimenting. Nice full text search results, imho superior to the mongodb option, but the latter was "good enough" for my needs, better supported and much lighter footprint so I stuck with it.
