I remember one of the main uses of the half-sticks (or important-post-flags) whas when if a user searched a word contained in such a post or thread, it would be placed at the top of the search.

This would improve the search engine and would help helpers to have to help a little less.

Erm yeah, i agree stickies an halfstickies on top of searches. Hi

I'm thinkin' about it...

Dunno if it's possible... without significantly slowing down the script, that is... I guess I'll have to try it to find out.

Also, the search script searches for posts, not threads, so if multiple posts from the same half-sticky thread are in the results, they would all be at the top...

Oh, ok, I just wasn't very sure you had read the post.

Cheers!

why not add a checkbox in the search form and say "this may slow down the search, continue?" when the user clicks the submit button?

It's not a fact about having a "slow search" It would probably not need more than a second. But the problem is that it may make the whole server respond a bit slower for everyone, causing more charge and maybe preveniting it to respond in time.

I don't think it's such drammatical, but I think you got me.

DZ:
I imagine you have all half-stickies defined on a separate table and that is linked by postid to the actual posts. Why don't you add a clumn in the posts that has 1 when the post is halfsticky or 0 when it isn't. This way you could easily order firstly by halfsticky bit and secondly by date. This wouldn't be much problem to the DB I think.