... that you have to take the time to "register" before you can search for answers to your problem.

[shakes head]

well it keeps people from putting un-needed stress on the LQ server!!
the LQ database is HUGE, and one can find the answer to any problem concerning Linux........use it wisely........thx

You can search and browse the forums without being a member.

I don't see the problem with having to be registered. I guess this also helps prevent spam.

--Ian

So whats wrong with registering. On many sites registration is a must before you can do anything on the site.

<me being an idiot and overreacting>uh... no, you can browse the forums with out registering. However, if you want to ask something, THEN you have to register. If google can crawl LQ, then you can with out being registered.

Stress on LQ servers? non-issue (ok, a really really small one)

If you can't post with out registering, then this prevents spam. Also the no links till you are a 5 post veteran keeps out the spam. To browse the forum or not has nothing to do with spam. </me an idiot>

On a reread, I can see why the SEARCH function would be register only, however using google turns up LQ results, and you can make google search one domain only.

The search is something that is quite heavy for the servers, and this might be why jeremy is restricting it to registered users. (not that it's hard to register)

titanium_geek

www.google.com/linux also searches this forum, so you may find threads that way, though, granted it doesn't only search this forum so...hope this helps.

Don't mind this troll. Some people are just too lazy to type a couple of things and click some buttons. Probably Gnome users. He he he.

FWIW, 95% of the time the search is available to all. We had a hardware failure recently and are currently using a spare server for the searches. As a result of this, the search is enabled only for registered members. We're working on a short and long term hardware plan now that the forum code has been upgraded.

--jeremy

Jeremy, it can't have been too recent, as one of the reasons I signed up was so I could use the search feature. Maybe less than approx. a year is considered recent. Thanks for locking the search for non-members. Without this "feature" I wouldn't be part of this great community!

Well, before the search server died things only got locked down to members-only when the load was above a certain limit.

--jeremy

Well, I guess that explains the lengthy search times I've encountered recently. I thought it was a problem with the new board. Hopefully, you will get your hardware problems sorted out soon as the search feature is near unusable for me at the present time.

you can just run "site:www.linuxquestion.org <search>" in google... although then you loose the ability to search specific forums and such (well you should be able to somehow, but i dont know enough about google searching) and it's not as nice, but it works and it's fast for when server is loaded.

What I don't understand is why these forums all have to contain smilies and all the other cruft, yet neglect basic functionality. For instance, wouldn't it be great if we could download all the archives in text form. Think about what a resource that would be - we could search the entire archives on our own drives with regular expression searches and such that you can only dream about with the default search on this site. People with slow internet connections would really benefit from this. In other words, the people who get the least from this sort of forum, but would stand to benefit the most.

hey, tdunne, welcome to LQ, but that is way offtopic. LQ is actually fairly cruft-less. You want to download all the archives in text form? why not ask for it? In your own thread?

All the archives? woah, that would be one hefty download. Over a dial up connection, very painful.

what kind of connection speed do you have, and have you turned of the loading of images, to enable you to browse faster? see also: how to survive a slow internet connection

titanium_geek

Offering all 2,000,000 posts in some kind of text download is unfortunately not something we plan to offer. The shear size of the download would make it pretty much useless for someone with a slow connection anyway. FWIW, we do try to keep cruft too a minimum. If you do have specific examples, a dedicated thread as titanium_geek indicated would be appreciated.

--jeremy