First off, you would be hard pressed to find an annoyed regular here. Somoene is ALWAYS available to answer a question, and Senior and longtime members will even go thru the trouble of searching and posting links to threads that are relevant to questions asked by newer members. We are not your typical forum. Im not sure what your used to, or how you chose to run your own forum, but we are obviously different, and we have a group of us who make decisions which are in the best interest of the site.
Let me offer some insight to everyone into my thinking about digging up historical data using searches. Our forum is over 5 years old. Data from 5 years ago may or may not hold true today. I know for a fact that if you ask me a question today about my brisket techniques, you will get a VERY different answer than you did 5 years ago, or even 2. As our knowledge base here grows, so do we. We have all become more experienced cooks based on things we have taken form here. I personally would prefer a new member ask the question and get new, accurate information than walk away with old informatin that has been much improved since it was written years ago. An added bonus, will in many cases be pointers to old threads that may still hold true.
i would also like to point out that you are wrong in your assumtions in the way our forum works. Search will become available based on your offering to our knowledge base. Meaning it will eventually come with a significant post count in the ontopic forums regardless of monetary donations, as does some other pay features. But they are NOT given away, there are features that will be earned based on a members participation and contribution, and I do not mean monetary. Value added, for adding value.
One of the things that caused us to move to a subscription base is the need for more horsepower, which thanks to the members stepping up, we are in the process of adding. Searches were causing significant spikes in CPU utilization, especially during peak hours. This was causing lags and increased response times. At one point we even had to limit the number of searches to every few minutes. When a board has 2000 lurkers searching, it effects everyone.
Prior to moving to subscriptions, over 1400 members were grandfathered in and have full search functionality. 1000 of them active. Allowing free reign to visitors, lurkers and people that only take away and do not offer anything in the form of knowledge or comaraderie, was taking away cycles and resources from those that helped support the site. It was decided to make the search one of the value added features available to those that support us.
We are in the process of adding a second server to offload all database activity to a dedicated server and this will eliviate the CPU spikes we experience. This feature may be re-addressed once its online and 'free trials' instituted, but our thinking here will always be to take care of those that support our site before we take care of the hit and runs, those that take our information and leave never to return or to ever post.