Somebody report it;)

Satan

wow 15 is low.... default value is 30 seconds i believe. I had the same problem on my forums, when I increased it to 45 i no longer got that message O_o

uhm, my message got cut off.. where did the rest go? wow this forum is possessed. it has a mind of its own.

It may not be a bug but just a query with a very heavy load. If you use wild cards in your search and use very commonly used keywords and especially use multi-keywords in search, it returns so many results from the db that it would take more than 30 seconds to return/process these results for search.php which will result in "Time out" errors.

If you have a large database you can encounter this problem even in "without wildcard" searches. Sometime ago David asked for a hack in request forum which will reduce the load in large db searching and I gave the code there. He had a large database and his searching was returning results in 14 seconds if 2 very commonly used keywords (and without wildcards!) were searched, thus killing server. After the hack is applied, we take it down to 2-3 seconds if I remember correctly. I couldn't find time to release the hack in Full Releases.

However I agree that vb should have a protection mechanism by default to prevent processing of so heavy search jobs as this can be easily exploited by malicous users. So from this point of view I agree that it's a bug. :)