wheel - 3:45 am on Nov 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

Seems to me that the proper way to have done this would have been to implement search first, then ban the bots. Eat the traffic until you've got search working. Though why a site populated by SEO'ers doesn't have a search feature is beyond me. And it's not like we woke up this morning and realized OMG#*$!BBQ! I just realized! We don't have search! This problem has been unresolved for ages.

In terms of your search numbers, I don't use search here because I can't be bothered to figure out how to run a search. How bizarre is that?

The fact of the matter is that the community doesn't care about 'why'. They just want you to make it work.

I'm sounding like I'm attacking, let me apologize in advance for that - I don't want to do that. I do want to suggest succinctly and pointedly that there's a number of community members unhappy about what's going on, and from here it tastes and feels like they're being brushed off. Switch it around and look at it from the customer's viewpoint not the internal workings of your org.