Can anyone point to the experiences of forum owners that have had forum db’s crash because of searches? So many forums require you to complete a stupid damn captcha before you can Search. What catastrophic event occurred to warrant this nonsense? Which data was lost? What are you trying to do apart from monumentally annoy people both because they have to do one in the first place but also because they probably cannot change image when it is actually unreadable? Why are you putting blocks in the way of people actually trying to find information and not therefore post again to a forum what could be other be discovered?
Want to see nonsense in action?
Roundcube forums are an example. There are so very many more.
So..anyone want to answer?
“The reason we captcha forum searches is ….”
They do this for the same reason some forums force a wait between searches. If the search is comprehensive it can hit many tables forcing a massive amount of disk operation and database transfers. On most shared hosts this can get your account suspended.
Really powerful and fast search systems need some sort of middle-ware to provide fast indexes for searching which isn’t provided by out-of-the box PHP/MySQL forum solutions. These are the real solutions that seriously popular forum sites should be implementing rather than the capture or throttle that we often see.
I was comparing everything to bbPress which at wp.org is still very nippy and it has a fair number of posts.
And forums like punBB are eve more annoying as they insert your post into the db.
Of course the most anoying part is loading tons of html, js, animated gifs, massive sigs just to see “Fixed it”.