Lack of support for searching complex BBS forums
The Fluid Dynamics Search Engine cannot be used to search many complex BBS systems, including phpBB, Ikonboard, Invision Board, YaBB, and UltimateBB.
These complex BBS systems cannot, in general, be searched by any stand-alone search engine because:
They are "robot traps". They create an infinite number of self-referencing URL's.
Much of the text on each page is common header, footer or navigational text that appears on all pages. This text is included in the keyword index along with the message text, confusing the search engine.
In many cases, the extracted title and description of each page will be the same, because the BBS system doesn't customize those fields on a per-message basis.
A majority of the URL's created by the system do not contain searchable information, such as the "reply" action or "new post" action. FDSE is not able to differentiate between content-rich and content-poor pages.
Many BBS systems require a cookie-based login in order to access all features. The FDSE crawler cannot navigate cookie-based logins.
Re-indexing BBS systems is resource-intensive because FDSE must revisit every URL on the system to learn about new posts.
Because of these problems, FDSE is not the best tool for searching complex BBS systems. A better option for searching these message boards is to use the built-in search function that comes with each system.
If you must use FDSE for searching message boards, you will need to create a set of Filter Rules to ensure that the crawler visits the correct pages. Setting up filters is labor-intensive and may take many hours for each board. Each board must be customized separately.
"Lack of support for searching complex BBS forums"
http://www.xav.com/scripts/search/help/1035.html