Currently, you can either search Live Content or Archives, but you can't search from both.

This honestly doesn't seem very effecient to me.

How about having the default option set to both instead? Search in both the archives and live content.

I'm pretty sure this is done for resource reasons, ergo, for efficiency itself... those are always separate tables, and one may not even be on the same server... I could be incorrect.

I'm pretty sure this is done for resource reasons, ergo, for efficiency itself... those are always separate tables, and one may not even be on the same server... I could be incorrect.

Correct, but in my case a user will just have to search one database, go back, then search the other. So it's not really that effecient.

I use the archiving system as a means of preventing people from posting in old, dead topic, as well as a means of boosting performance. I still want people to be able to find these old threads, however.

A post is a post, archived or not.

Actually, when searching by tags, it pulls content from both. So there doesn't seem to be any reason as to why the search engine shouldn't be able to as well.

Awaiting further input, it sounds a lot more like an implementation choice then... I agree.
At least power setting or reason re it.. seems a strange inconsistency in behaviour regardless.

Tags for all applications are stored in one database table, so it's not a problem grabbing tags for anywhere in one go.

Topics and archived topics are stored in two separate database tables (potentially on two different servers), and I'm afraid it's simply not possible to search two tables/servers at once efficiently.

We are continuing to evaluate ways to work around this in future versions.

What if the forum is using Sphinx? Does it combine the results from the tables then? (I'm glad I saw this topic, I had no idea the archiver resulted in breaking search like that...glad I didn't turn it on!)

What if the forum is using Sphinx? Does it combine the results from the tables then? (I'm glad I saw this topic, I had no idea the archiver resulted in breaking search like that...glad I didn't turn it on!)

I'd also like to know this. I was about to turn archiving on (have 2.5 million posts), but if there's no unified search for live/archived posts/topics, I'm not nearly as interested in using the Archive feature.

Thanks,

..Al

The Sphinx search option, while it does support searching in multiple simultaneous indexes, does not search in both indexes at this time.

could sphinx be easily made to do it by manually adding correct line to conf file?
while having system build conf file that includes it right now is an issue, could something dealing with core_archive_log in sphinx.conf be added manually to allow it?

The Sphinx search option, while it does support searching in multiple simultaneous indexes, does not search in both indexes at this time.

Thanks for the clarification. This would be a nice enhancement to the Sphinx support--I'd love the performance benefits of using the archiving, but it's a non-starter if archived topics are ignored during a normal search.

..Al