"in the interests of performance" leads me to wonder about the definition of performace. What is trumping here is speed of the system, and that is a part of performance. But it seems to me that performance is about total usefulness to the user, which is more than speed, and the current set up makes it harder to use the site, makes the site less valuable, will over time deter users not attract them.

Without search, I and I expect others will just post a new topic. Duplicative. Uses system resources unnecessarily. Uses poster resources unnecessarily. Might inhibit the genoristy of information sharing.

Without New Posts, I am not current about the overview unless I select I spend at least 30 minutes clicking through topics. Being current was a huge benefit to me from this site. This for me is a way bigger loss.

Would you want to consider a hierarchy of users (I don't really like this idea), where one would have to have been registered for a certain length of time to use New Posts?

Sylvia, sad and lonely

SylviaCaras and Kremmen:
You both seem to have difficulty in understanding the challenge of making sure that FT runs in a safe and secure way with as best performance as it can provide. As it may be that you don't believe us, please follow the below link to vBulletin, the company that designs and builds the software that runs most of the top traffic bulletin boards in the world - of which FlyerTalk is happy to be among. In this post on their own Web site - not ours - you'll see that they have posted about a fix for a significant potential security flaw. The most important part of this page comes right below that when they note "Performance Hit Since PHP 4.3.10 / 5.0.3". Apparently the installation of their security flaw fix has caused in their words "suddenly started to run significantly slower than normal after installing PHP 4.3.10 or 5.0.3 in order to patch the security flaw in previous versions of PHP." That is what has crippled FT since around mid-January when we all startted to notice a real performance problem on FT. We realized that we had to make a decision: allow search, but not allow members to access FT or temporarily shut off search and allow members to continue to use FT until this fix is available in a stable form. We have apparently made the wrong decision for you. We apologize. It is our hope that upon reading where this problem originates, you'll cut us a little slack for being bungling idiots that can't even provide search for you. We have not invented this problem and we are not trying to make your experience on FT miserable.

At the end of this day, I can only say I'm sorry.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127027

And when the fix for this from PHP/vBulletin has taken longer than any of us would have hoped, we no longer give you a false hope as there is no mention of a date in the announcement of when this will be fixed. We did however provide the Google work around which members provided and it seems to work for most.

I'm not saying that you're bungling idiots, but I do believe that you made the wrong decision. I spent 10 mins trying to find a post through google yesterday and gave up. FT search would have taken a few seconds. Given the choice between the whole system taking twice, or even 10 times, as long vs. search via google taking 1000 times longer or being impossible, I'd opt for the former without hesitation.

If the performance impact of searches is such a big deal, how about a restricted version? Searching for recent posts and ones own posts would cover a lot of what people do that google can't do, while not providing the usual full-blown search facility.

The problem isn't that SEARCH takes so long, it is that the load search puts on the board brings the entire board to a halt. Certain types of searches actually make the database crash and rendering the board useless for several minutes.

Search complaints have been posted by 10 or so members, but with an unusable board 40000+ members get impacted. I think its a small price to pay for a board that runs, it isn't like search is gone for good, it will be back soon enough...

I have not complained yet, because I did not know where I should complain, and didn't feel that it would help much. Now that I have found the place to complain in, I still don't feel that it will change anything...so why bother. I am sure that the low number of complaints does not accurately reflect how the number of people who are not happy.

That being said, I can understand and appreciate the dilemma that FT is facing. For me, FT becomes mostly unusable without being able to find new posts. I still log on several times a day to browse, but it is more for curiousity than utility, while I read OMNI, or something about UA. With regular site capabilities running, I regularly check NEW POSTS, to see if anything is interesting.

Hope the site is fixed quickly.

I really wouldn't take the low number of complaints as an indication that people are happy. We are just simply waiting patiently for things to get back to normal.

As for me personally, I have basically stopped using FlyerTalk for the meantime because I can't find Today's Posts (new posts). I just takes to much time to click on every category to see if there is anything interesting.

Until search is fully restored, would it be possible to allow some limited searches (as an example - searches that only search one forum and only go back 3 months)?

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.

The php security threat was substantial: a published, easily performed exploit. Downgrading php is not an option.

The choice was not between performance and the upgrade. At the time of the upgrade we had no idea that there would be a performance problem -- I doubt that the php developers intended to introduce problems. And this is the issue with installing an unstable, dev release of php. What other problems might we introduce by doing so?

Believe me we are not happy with our options right now either, however we are limited by the technology available.

I miss new posts and search also, especially now when traveling. I thought the problem was mostly with the computer here but now know differently. Guess I got spoilt.

FT Admins:

I, for one, commend you one job you guys do on the board. I also thank you for taking this PHP flaw into consideration, and take down the feature(s) that expose this flaw until it's corrected.

I can live without the search & new post abilities for a extended period of time since we are dealing with a flaw that could down the entire board.

Keep up the good work guys.

-Colby

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.