Can't see Post Histories

[Mollez]

When I visit other people's profiles, they have links that say "find all posts started by x" and "find all threads started by x". But when I click them, it says I don't have "permission" to do this. This is a picture of the error message:

http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/9496/eal5.png

And I thought maybe that was just something you weren't allowed to do, but I can't do it for my own profile and posts either. Is this normal? Should I be able to do this, do I have to achieve some goal first, or are those links there for no reason? :smallconfused:

[Siosilvar]

That uses the search function, which is currently and indefinitely disabled.

[Mollez]

That uses the search function, which is currently and indefinitely disabled.

Oh. Why is that? Did something happen?

[Douglas]

Oh. Why is that? Did something happen?
Search requires a set of very large index tables in the database. It's been long enough that I don't remember all the details, but there was at some point a multi-day period of forum down time that involved copying, moving, restoring from backup, or something along those lines, the entire database. It might have been for a server upgrade or something similar, I'm not sure. After a few days, everything but the search indexes were done, but the search indexes still had a long way to go.

In order to get the forums back online without waiting an unknown additional number of days, Rawhide stopped the operation and just let the search indexes get dropped. That let him put everything except search (and everything that uses it) back up immediately, at the cost of search being inoperable.

Restoring search would require rebuilding those index tables, a process which would take even longer than the copy (or whatever) that was aborted for taking too long, and while the rebuild was running the forums would be completely down.

Short version: Everyone, including the mods and admins, wants search back, but the cost of restoring it is taking the forums down for, at a guess, two or three weeks (this could be inaccurate, but I'd be very surprised by any figure less than one full week), and they are not currently willing to accept that price.

[Mollez]

Ah. Thank you!

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Indeed.