I seem to be having difficulty with the ILP search engine. Either that or there was a data loss that occurred somewhere along the line. I can’t find (by searching) a number of posts I know I made. Anyone else have this problem?
Yup, I made a similar post about 2 months ago, it seems like posts from a certain range in 2005-2007 aren’t showing up in searches. It didn’t get a response, though.
Xun, the search engine seems to be working for me. It could be related to the type of browser and the settings that are configured for it. I have MS IE latest version.
So, I looked into this, and apparently it would take about 60 hours to re-index the boards, which is what is required to fix the issue of not being able to find old posts. That’s a rough estimate, but it’s the best I could find. I’ll keep looking, but the issue is that the search feature runs off an index of all the posts, and with a forum this large it takes a lot of processing to create. And, during that time the boards would be inaccessible.
I’ll keep investigating, but what I have so far says it’s not worth the downtime.
I’m inclined to agree. 
60 hours, wow. That is a lot of downtime! Thanks for looking into that.
Maybe over a holiday? Nahhh, three days is too long. No way. Thanks though.
Yeah, it seems insane, especially since every site has to do it when they transition from phpBB 2.0 to 3.0. I’ll have to keep asking around to see if there’s a workaround for big boards.
EDIT: Looking into it a little more, I think we’re out of luck for now. There is an update in the works for the board software that will make it possible to stick any old search engine in place of the default they provide. In fact, that’s what the phpBB development community currently does on their own boards, which is a good indication that there’s no better option.