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The multiple forums really were meant to be independent of each other. With the exception of self-searches, I didn't build the database to accommodate cross-forum activity.

Technically this is because some forums may be (and are) completely private (like the FAB forum and the Moderator forum) and eventually each will have its own moderators and its own ban lists, etc. Determining what to return as a search result and what not to return based on what can be seen by the searching user can be a complex issue. The straightforward way (of doing an SQL join) would cause significant delays in data flow due to read locking of tables. (Unless I'm doing something wrong with MySQL!)

The policy I designed into the code is that each forum is independent. The justification for the several independent forums on FR is that the material on those forums (with the exception of News/Activism) would not and/or should not have been allowed to be posted (or rather, would have been pulled.) (The amount of leeway given to content had increased over the years, or so many say. However, a strict interpretation of Free Republic's mission would have most of the stuff previously posted on the old format pulled. Instead of that, it now has a General Interest forum.)

Now, I am considering the ability to search all /public/ forums as it should be trivial to maintain an "is_public" flag on the search index. Though that may confuse people who expect to see results from all forums they can access. If it is technically possible (that is, if it doesn't significantly increase the query time), I will make it search all accessible forums. This function will be separate and removed from the quick search bar... it would probably be found under an advanced page.

I shouldn't say "most of the stuff", that's wrong. "A lot of the stuff" is more correct.

Thanks for the update, John!

I understand. (I think!)

BTW, thank you for EVERYTHING that you do!

(And, congratulations to the entire FR team for getting the $1,000,000 judgment dropped to $10,000!)