I was looking at the Request and Vote for New Features for DDB thread. I clicked on the Search button and selected the Search this Thread option in the drop-down menu that appeared. I searched on the word "link" which appears in the first sentence of the first response to the thread. No results came back. I tried other words in responses in the thread, and I got the same result.

When I attempt to find anything on the forums, the result is the same: "no results found", and the search string looks like that -

Search results for '��������������������'

Search on site itself works fine, though (thank goodness!)

Running into this same issue. Attempted searching both the forums as a whole and the specific forums.

Searching the forums would make life so much easier sometimes.

IamSposta, I'm not sure how to interpret your reply. Is this an issue you've been having as well? Has the search feature ever worked for you on the forums? Or was that perhaps a suggestion that we manually search through the forums? I've tried finding other threads or mentions of the forum search function but haven't had any luck.

On my iPhone and iPad it doesn’t even give me an option to search the forums, neither in portrait nor in landscape.

 Thank you for the report! I am also able to reproduce the issue that you describe. I've passed along the information to the team. 

I keep trying to search the Forums, but keep getting the following message no matter what I search. I have no idea what could be going wrong. I don't believe it's an issue with my keyboard or my language settings. Any ideas?

It's definitely something on their end, it was reported yesterday as well. Interestingly, if you perform a search, get to that results page, and then delete anything in the URL bar after the search string you entered (here 'magic item fixed spell attack) and hit enter, you do get results. Not sure if they're complete or accurate, but you don't get the error in the header. Hopefully that might help some folks until they get this issue resolved.

When attempting to search the forum using the advanced search form, I get no results and the search term is rendered back using the unicode replacement character:

Search results for '��������������������'

Simple (single field) search does work.

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.113 Safari/537.36 (but i tried on ff and chrome)

It appears when I search for anything within a thread, or within a forum, nothing can be found.

This is what I see, no matter the search term, even the word "search."

Search results for '��������������������'
No results were found.

I think they are looking into this. Hopefully gets fixed soon.

Quote from DxJxC >>

I think they are looking into this. Hopefully gets fixed soon.

 I hope so too! It's frustrating and it's causing unnecessary threads since people can't search for the answers. 

For some reason every search I undertake spits out the same result as seen in the snipped.

https://imgur.com/a/SZeKm1O

I've tried several searches, but all of them end with this message.

Still does not work! The Search function is one of the most important part of the forums. Can we get it fixed?

Really hoping for an issue here - have a ppb campaign going for over a year that's been very detailed and search is one of the only ways to see if we've talked about something before. Thanks for looking into it!

Workaround

1. Submit your search as normal.
   You'll get the broken results
2. Edit the URL returned and remove the by-author= portion.
   Press enter and you should get back the results you wanted.

Example

Searching the forum titles for "gift cards", I get the following URL:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/search?search-thread-id=&search-forum-id=&search=gift+cards&search-type=1&by-author=&begin-date=&begin-time=&end-date=&end-time=&min-posts=&min-views=&forum-scope=f&search-specific-forums=&display-type=1&submit=y

I can get the results I wanted by instead going to:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/search?search-thread-id=&search-forum-id=&search=gift+cards&search-type=1&begin-date=&begin-time=&end-date=&end-time=&min-posts=&min-views=&forum-scope=f&search-specific-forums=&display-type=1&submit=y

Thank you, Sir! You are the best! How did you even came up with it!

There are many small bugs here and there with view/edit scripts, but to learn that the major function is affected by the same type of simple code error... Hope, they will fix it one day.

For the past few weeks, any search in the forums finds no results, and displays:

Search results for '��������������������'

whatever the entered search string actually was. Occurs in "Search this thread"  "...this forum" or "...all forums", whether "All" "Title" or "Posts" is checked

Using MS Edge, persisted after restart and update. It started around the time the dice roller was broken, I had assumed it was part of the same error (and, being unable to search, could not find if that was anyone else's experience)

thanks,

Yep. Been a few threads about this now.