[photon]

Originally Posted by frinkprof

Certain search and query functions have also been scaled back, including the thanks stats/searches a couple years ago, post history searches, and users viewing threads/forum lists. These were also useful and user-friendly tools.

Thanks searches were scaled back because the code of the thanks feature itself was not designed well enough to scale up with the number of users and posts we have, regardless of what kind of server you throw at it. You can only compensate for bad design so far.

As an aside, that's a significant downside of community written plugins for software; they are frequently done by volunteers that don't have the time or the knowledge to build code that will handle the large scenarios (this is actually a common problem with developers in general hence the emergence of DevOps).

If someone wants to step forward to rewrite the thanks plugin to allow for those searches I'll gladly install it.

I'm not sure what you mean by post history searches (search was only turned off for a short time as a test to see if it was a significant contributing factor), but users viewing threads and forum lists are, like thanks, only temporarily disabled until we get on the new servers.

Originally Posted by frinkprof

If the user experience is being rolled back with the loss of these features, I think that CP should do one or both of the following to improve it:

As said previously in the thread, the features aren't being rolled back, only temporarily disabled until the migration to the new servers is completed.

Originally Posted by frinkprof

but it's a bit head-scratching when the user experience is then hindered in the first place by the sponsored forums, and then scaled back when the demand grows.

As said above, it's not being scaled back, it's being disabled until the new servers are ready to host the site. And the root cause has pretty much nothing to do with demand (or increase in demand anyway, if the site had 5 viewers it would perform pretty awesome).

EDIT: Reading back over that kind of repeating myself there, sorry I should have maybe combined all those into one response.

With respect to any advertising or sponsorship, those are Bingo's domain and I don't even know if he's aware of this thread so if anyone wants their input to be seen by Bingo then they should probably let him know directly, or at least point him to your post. You mentioned cc. Bingo so I assume you already did that, that last part was for anyone else.