Sigh, this is one item I have really been wanting to implement: searching the message forum. The problem is the forum and it's messages are created/formatted each time you view it, with content formatted into HTML code from a text database. There's no way to implement a search function using traditional tools.

One method would be to use a "spider" indexer (which would index this site much like Alta Vista), but the cheapest one I've found is $800. Currently I use Excite For Web Servers, but it indexes from the inside - useless for this forum.

Next would be to program a search script that would itself go through the database files and compile a list of matches to queries, but I'm not up to that task - I didn't write this message board, I've just tweaked and tweaked and added more and more power - arrghhh, arrggh, arrggh! :-)