when i search for anything it just opens a new tab with my default search engine with the search term and a strange string added to it.... i was trying to search the forum for anything having to do with sleep and the search term opened in the duckduckgo tab was "sleep site:forum.tixati.com" ... when searching the help page for sleep it was "sleep site:support.tixati.com"
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this is NOT helpful :)

everything worked correctly for me. it is supposed to go to duckduckgo and do a forum site search for your search term.

Yes it automatically uses DDG for me too and works.
site:xyz is a special search term that limits the results only to the website xyz. It works perfectly fine only showing results from Tixati forums. Some other search engines support site: too.