Agn

The Search feature has to index every post in a database... and that database exceeded several hundred megabytes. To save space and bandwidth, it was deleted.

WL disabled it, apparently was useless space...

i found it useful.

Many of the mods are rioting (well, not quite) that it is gone.

I dummo what WL will do about it. He might leave it as is, or might put in a search that takes a long time (no index) and is reserved for mods on up (because they are the only ones who need it, and will know not to whine because it takes 10-20 min to do one search)

Now when I need to find old topics for reference, I'll have to do it the hard way. 😞

If search ALL forums was taken out of the search option, would that help it to not have to search the whole database? I don't know anything about MySQL databases except that they are fast. :laughing:

Well...as long as members are not affected in anyway, I'm up for changes. But when they affect member status, I say hell no.

I never took 20 min to do a search for me. a few minuites at the most. If I chose a specific forum then maybe half a minite. With half of the posts deleted then it should be even less. I think it should be reinstated for all members. Also, I don't know much about how the forums work but couldn't you put the search database on another drive? Then it wouldn't take up too mush bandwidth on the main server.

I used to use the "View New Posts" option every time I came here. It would be nice if that still worked, but it is part of the search engine. Too bad there isn't a way to just have newer topics be searchable, like from the last week.

I actually was going to edit that to my post! I do use that function pretty often. Since that works by just comparing your "last visited" date with the posts it seems easy to implement without creating a database of topics. Or at least it could work that way.
Similarly searching not by keyword but by username, date, or title might also be easy and consume less memory and time.

I only used the search function once, and even then it didn't return what I was looking for. I don't miss it.

I sorta miss the " View New Posts" option...😞

But i suppose if it saves space its all good..😃

I too used the search for many things.
When I first came I used it for asking ZC questions and that way did not clog up space asking Q's already been answered.
Hope they find a way to work it back in.