There have been reports of a massive bot registrations recently.
This could be related to a possible forums DDoS attack vector they have been attempting to exploit.
/tinfoil-hat
Just curious as to how would that be related to the search feature on the forum ?
No the disable has nothing to do with the bot account registrations, but the RAID failure.
Due to a failure of the RAID array that bitcointalk.org was running on, the database became corrupted. It was necessary to move the OS and restore the database using a daily backup. About 8 hours of data was lost (anything after about Jan 21 21:44 UTC).
I've been busy getting the forum back online, so I haven't investigated this much yet, but it may be possible for me to manually restore lost posts/PMs by searching the recovered database files for keywords that you remember. If you lost a post or PM that you feel is absolutely irreplacable, PM me and I'll see if I can recover it.
Everyone's drafts were also all lost. These are not backed up because they're automatically deleted after 14 days anyway.
Search is temporarily disabled because I need to regenerate the search index before it will be usable again.