I hope this doesn't sound like an overstatement but I believe this is one of the greatest contributions to DotNetNuke ever. Since all the wonderful programming in DNN can never be matched in energy in by folks inclined to document, the forums are the main documentation resource. They are make-or-break drop dead critical. Yet the forums team seems to be in denial about what I guess almost all users consider huge deficiencies. Not having any search except exact phrase match is one problem that might be seen as rather unbelievable since it hearkens a generation and two decades back before information retrieval became pervasively available. I don't recall offhand if I know of another search system today that only uses exact phrase matches and is unable to ignore different word orders function words etc. And the forums team has not at all been responsive to requests for this basic feature. I'm sure they make an important contribution but perhaps are so busy to have lost perspective on what is most important. They seem to spend time adding duplicative features and architectures that are best provided modularly in separate components. (Private messaging for example is redundantly provided as part of the forums module.) This whole problem of not having real search for past messages in the forums is probably reducing the overall efficiency of the thousands of people using DotNetNuke by 10-30 percent. What a waste of human capital.
And it's not just that one feature. The search is very slow and has a crude user interface for anyone trying to work efficiently. Search even times out frequently depending on various system issues over the last year or so.
It's also the case that the people in fundamental roles of power don't seem to be easily contacted about such an overarching problem.
Now you come along with the simplest and most elegant workaround.
I wanted to say thanks and also wish you good fortune in publicizing your offering so all the poor souls doing searches in the forums every day. Your search helps all of us searching the DNN site forums and now I hope word might spread to the team that there remains a problem for all the sites that use the forums module. For their users the problems remain.