Per our discussions at our last 2 Bugzilla meetings, this param should go away. It should be replaced by a constant = 4.

I see (from this blog entry http://lpsolit.wordpress.com/) that the proposed replacement is to edit this in Constants.pm. Is that because it's a seldom-tweaked parameter? Just seems a bit backwards to take a parameter that a growing or shrinking site might like to configure, and stick it in a source file. The assumption seems to be that the Administrator is someone who's also comfortable dropping down to the server and editing a source file, which doesn't jive with most installs I've seen. It's usually set up once for a group, then someone gets training and takes ownership of the Admin screens - they never even see the source. Also, 4 words seems a bit low to me for a default value, especially for any corporate users with grunty servers (eg: my last 3 jobs); have you done any performance tests to determine the threshold where searching comments degrades response times? I'd normally set this higher (say 10), then lower it when quick searches start taking more than 2 seconds to return. Since someone is bound to ask, here's an example quicksearch that needs more than 4 words and should hit the comments, as submitted by one of our testers: reports Merchandise Planning Excel export work around

Actually, if we use fulltext searching, we don't have to worry about how many terms we have, so the blocker will fix this.

The blocker has been fixed, the parameter no longer exists.

Added to the release notes in bug 547466.