Non-Member Fourm Searches

[Nano Geek]

First of all I think that the Ubuntu Forums are great and I recently became a member, but recently they made a change to the forum that won't let people who are not registered with them do searches.

Ubuntu's slogan is "Linux for Human Beings", and one of the reasons that it's so popular is because of it's user-friendliness, but a new user who has never used Ubuntu before and saw that he couldn't do on this forum what he could do on nearly any other forum dose not seem to be very inviting.

So what do you think?

[souki]

They probably have a good reason to do this (search engines are quite expensive in term of cpu and memory)

so, for me the question should be :
would you like to share the server's ressources with anonymous and suffer with slow queries ?

If you don't take the time to register, or if you don't want to, you will still be able to search this forum with google (or other external spidering search engine):
site:ubuntuforums.org forum search

[Nano Geek]

I havn't done any timing, but I have not noticed a speed diffrence during searches that I made before they stoped allowing non-members and after I became a member.

Thanks for the tip about searching on Google. I just had a idea: why not make the non-member searches use google instead. Then there wouldn't be any problem. I think it would be fairly easy to do this, but I'm not a web developer so I'm not sure.

[az]

So that's why the number of registered users is growing by a thousand per day!

What a great way to inflate the numbers! People are basing their estimates of the relative size of a linux distribution on things like that.... This fudges that.

I don't know why this is or why it is needed. It seems mean to me. I wish they would change it back.

[htinn]

The problem with using Google is that you can't search by topic titles or various methods that increase the chances of finding what you're looking for.

(In fact I recall a recent search on google that was like this: "linux +wine +bug -free -deals -offer -price -buy -sell")

[aysiu]

I've always found the Google searches to be better than the forum searches, so I don't see any reason to allow unregistered people to use the forum search.

[ubuntu-geek]

There is another thread I mentioned why we did this. Simply put we need more hardware to handle the searching an email was dispatched a few weeks ago requesting more ram and even additional hardware. I have no answer so I don't know were we stand in regards to that.

People should't accuse when they don't know the full reason of us disabling it. I'll gladly enable it and watch the server die and then everyone can cry about that.

Some people are never happy on this forum.. It's always bitch bitch bitch..

[htinn]

I just assumed it was a CPU issue. Thanks for the heads up, ubuntu-geek. :)

[Nano Geek]

Sorry ubuntu-geek,

I didn't mean to make trouble. I didn't know why non-members wern't able to search. Mabye you should put that on the front page of the fourm so people will know about it.

[KiwiNZ]

U-G's reply fully explains this ,no need to continue