must be signed in to Search/stupid verification

[mobius]

when somebody has time could they remove this useless feature?

Sometimes I want to search the forum and I'm not signed in so this thing pops up where I have to go through the captcha code and answer questions. It's not as bad for me cause I'm a member but for non-members they have to go through all that. Seems totally useless and annoying imo.

[Simon]

-- Simon

[namida]

I'm not going to remove the registration or first-post verification, but I'll see what I can do about the search.

EDIT: Done.

[ccexplore]

It is kind of strange now that you brought it up, is there some kind of DDOS scenario the captcha on search was meant to mitigate?  Hopefully not, I guess we'll find out.

[Simon]

Against attacks, there is a 5-second wait enforced between two queries.

namida: Thanks!

-- Simon

[namida]

Theoretically, yes. In practice, no, not anything that's likely to happen. It was initially a safeguard against automated guest searches (not nessecerially malicious; more likely search engine crawlers and the like) running up large amounts of bandwidth/resource usage costs; but since these are quite low as-is, it won't hurt to at least trial turning it off. Since I can definitely see how it'd be annoying, if any problems do occur I'll see if there's a less-intrusive solution.

[mobius]

thanks a lot!

It's really not that big of a deal so if it must be re-instituted someday I won'd be sad. It was just one of those little things that usually made me say "forget it" because I honestly don't have time to poke around on the internet anymore.