To: russet who wrote (8315 ) 12/10/2004 6:12:55 PM From: SI Bob Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 46821 When I bought my lifetime membership 5 years ago the search function worked Yes it did. And it does in this version, too. And is a helluva lot better than the one on the version of the site we acquired. It's not only a lot better, it's also orders of magnitude more reliable. Let me list the improvements to it: 1. Very reliable. The old version wasn't, and required my FREQUENT intervention to get it working. 2. Now you can do a search for words contained in thread headers. The old version never had that. 3. The old version would only do "Subject" searches for threads that had relatively recent activity. The current searches all threads; not just the recently active ones. 4. The old version's "Member" search only worked correctly if a person's alias had never been changed or, if it had, you happened to know what their alias was about a year ago. The new version searches current aliases. 5. The old version's "Member" search only returned the aliases of members who had posted. The current version doesn't care if they posted or not. Granted, this addition is of no value that I can think of, but it's still something different. 6. The old version could only search public messages. This version lets you also search private messages written to or by you. IMO, this is an enormous improvement over the old one and immensely handy. In addition, we've added an "Advanced Search" that's extremely feature-rich. SI used to have an Advanced Search for a short period of time a long time ago. It didn't when we acquired it and hadn't for ages. We have it, but it's extra-cost.I paid for it, give it back. Incorrect. You paid for the ability to post and the ability to do batch message reads ("Next10") and to make the ads go away on the message pages. Everything else was available for free, including Search.and I could read posts by poster instead of by thread 5 years ago? Or anytime at all this year prior to our changing to this version? You and at least one other person are insisting this was the case and apparently you're maintaining that it was available only to paying members. The more I find my time absorbed in arguing about this, the more inclined I am to just say screw it and make that one feature available to everyone, but at the same time, yank all of the other things I added and make them only available to Premium-Plus accounts. Including but not remotely limited to items 2 through 6 above. I feel like I've added an awful lot to the site, including many additional features you now have available that you never did before. And I also felt like it was a good thing that I took on this kind of financial risk by stepping in and saving this site. I have zero doubt it wouldn't even be operational today if we hadn't. And on top of adding numerous features at no additional charge, when I selected 3 (count 'em, 3, but the number will go up, as will the number of features available to *you* at no extra charge) features that were a superset of the existing features, I decided to make them available at a nominal fee of $19.95 per year. It would've been far easier on many levels to only make them available to quarterly, semi-annual, and annual subscribers.Taking away basic services we paid for many years ago digs a hole in the ground for SI Can you list these "basic services" you paid for that have been taken away? The only ones I'm aware of (like a more complicated/detailed version of Ignore) are still slated to be added. But even that wouldn't make the list because it was available whether you bought a subscription or not. I'm very interested in knowing what basic services you paid for that are not currently available to you. And I'll reply to your list with my own list. Features available to you now that aren't available to free members and weren't available to you on the previous version of the site.