[boggseric]

Originally Posted by TechGuy

My point is that even if you can afford the $2k solution, it doesn't matter -- that solution doesn't exist.

Without reading through the entire thread, what's the status of using advanced search fields using the solution you mentioned earlier? (It was a long time ago when we last tried, but I remember we had to drop it because we couldn't sort by most of the fields.)

Sorting is definitely an issue. But from my forums perspective we had nothing to lose. The vBulletin search and MySQL search both brought our server to it's knees and frequently even crashed the server.

So we basically only had a few options:

Trim almost all of our posts and threads and put them in a different database. This seems like a good idea, but then you have to maintain two databases and do some trickery to not lose your total post count in your main forum. Then the users have to switch forums to search for something if they don't find it in the main forum. Large searches in the archive forum still eat up MySQL resources on the server and slow down the main forum.

Not allow searching at all. Not an option for us, we are a car tech forum and people MUST be able to search for data.

Continue with the vBulletin/Fulltext searches and just deal with the slow forum, crashes and angry users.

We chose sphinx, it may not be perfect but it's better than any option vBulletin has offered.