Today I was trying to find some information in the Ubuntu forums.

I’m seriously annoyed. There was one thread that seemed relevant, but it has some 310 pages. Yes, thats over 3000 posts.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu (and I consider this arrogant behaviour) doesn’t allow you to search the forum or access attached images if you are not registered.

I can understand things like spam protection. But WTF do you require registration for searching? I mean… I was trying to find out if the Ubuntu community could help, and all I get is “register first”!? Thats pure harrasment of non-registered users.

I don’t think I’ll bother to remember another username and password just for their crappy forums. I hate forums anyway. And the size of that thread just shows that forums don’t scale well. Especially if you can’t search.

[Update: yes, I’ve been a bit harsh here. The front page says that they’re experiencing speed issues, and thus have disabled search within the forum. Actually I can’t believe that search requests make such a huge load (especially compared to me browsing a 30-page thread…) - but maybe their search function is just implemented badly? I wouldn’t be surprised if they do some huge SELECT to search, and don’t have an index optimized for text searching.

Maybe they shouldn’t be using a closed source software for running their forum. I guess they could just fix the search functionality then. If opensource software doesn’t meet their requirements, they’re bound to get some support by the community to make the software meet them, if vBulletin actually is better in some points. IMHO vBulletin sucks. And given the speed issues “it is what the admin prefers” might miss some important point - that at some point you can’t just keep getting a larger CPU]