Originally Posted by studentff
Please don't (anyone) take the low number of complaints as an indication of a low level of unhappiness. Such misconceptions could eventually lead the powers that be to decide "search isn't worth it," and leave it off permanently. If a thread of "I want search back" followed-up by a few hundred "me too"s is necessary to dispel such misconceptions, I'll be happy to start one in several forums.
To me, the tradeoff isn't about the "small price to pay" of search vs. an inoperable board. The real tradeoff is search vs. whatever php security patch caused FT to become slow.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to fully analyze if the php "security threat" that indicated the upgrade was so severe as to warrant this substantial performance and functionality loss, so I'll leave that choice to the powers that be. But I do have some doubts. I do wonder if either downgrading to the old php or running the dev version that has fixed the issue would have been viable alternatives to disabling search for weeks.
Considering entire boards on the internet were being defaced, and completely erased I'd say this was more than a "threat". It was a very serious situation and there were websites out there you could enter the url of a forum into and see it empty 5 minutes later. It was THAT serious. Serious enough that I got out of bed at 4am to fix my own servers.
Waking up in the morning without search is not as bad as waking up to a black flyertalk homepage with "defaced" all over it.