I have pretty much stayed out of this discussion, but I would just like to remark that on another bulletin board I visit, which is somewhat comparable in size to Flyertalk, but actually a little bit smaller, search had been completely turned off for quite a while already - much longer than it had been turned off on Flyertalk - I believe due to the same technical problems with vbulletin that have been experienced here.

While I understand and share the frustration of not being able to do searches on Flyertalk, I personally do not feel that it is fair to direct any anger about this at Randy or the technical staff, especially, and while I believe that everyone contributes to the Flyertalk community and experience with their posts, I am not sure if this entitles some of us to what might be considered a somewhat demanding tone.

By the way, since it has been brought up, the other site recently turned search back on for "contributing members", but in peak traffic times, search needs to be taken down even for those who made a contribution, simply because the server would crash otherwise. But my personal opinion is that it might be an interesting solution to look into, however, to me it seems like a business decision to make that is solely up to the owner of Flyertalk.

I'll admit that my technical expertise is extremely limited, so I cannot comment on why other large vbulletin boards might be able to keep search up, but I just wanted to share the experience from the other message board I visit. Their problems also started when they introduced a newer vbulletin version (which has other benefits). Those guys who run that bulletin board are also very tech-savvy, but just like we do here, they say that they do have to wait for whenever a newer vbulletin version will have fixed the problem to be able to turn search back on for all members, as far as I understand.