I can respect that. I've run public forums (including multiple phpbb) and defending them against scum is challenging.
FWIW it was my experience that the only difference of turning this knob down is the SIZE of the index. It increases because it adds an index of the article number (and, I think, offset - it MIGHT do a scan of the field once it's pulled the record from the DB. A 'rep scasb' is fairly cheap once you've taken the DMA and moved it to L1 ) of every two character sequence. On
really large forum (and just looking at the article numbers that's a primary incrementing key and having some idea of the valid traffic here, you're not. Sorry.) it makes a difference on article
writes. Other than size increase on a post there's very little practical difference. You could put the search page behind login (ISTR there's a plugin for that.), but IMO it's unworth it. If you're hit with a DOS attack and have 100K people executing a search simultaneously, you have other problems.
I don't
know the load on your system. I don't
know your traffic. I do know this market and specifically this software reasonably well and it's my experience that it won't negatively impact things. It's my experience as a user here (I lurk a lot more than I post.) is that being unable to search terms like "s3" and "c6" is frustrating.
I'd recommend trying it. You have two options (reverting it, password protecting search) that cost minutes each. I think it'll be helpful.
Or, The Group That Names Things could quit naming EVERYTHING ESP32-nn.
I'm done contributing writing to Discord. It's totally unsearchable. The only person you can ever help is the person that asked you the question in realtime. A month later, someone else with the same question has to ask it again. So I don't get a vote but I hope that you and the rest of the team have spent enough time on forums of similar groups to weigh heavily on that.
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