Hi Lightfoot. To be totally pedantic in answering you, I have not. But I certainly have seen various evidence that suggests a completely different reason. The following items are numbered in no particular order:
ITEM#1:
On June 05, 2001 at 05:56am, BoobwatchOne posted:
>Will the search function be available with this new forum? And,
>dare I ask: Will we be able to search posts from the old forum?
On June 05, 2001 at 06:11am, Webmaster posted:
>I hate to bring bad news, but we lost all the posts in the old
>forum -- they're gone for good. Once we have some more posts
>here, I'll turn on the search feature. Doesn't make much sense
>to have it now...
ITEM#2:
The old BEA Forum was removed, NOT "lost" (yes it had a lot of data corruption, but that's not the point I'm making here). Why?
ITEM#3:
The UBB banner has not been replaced with the BEA banner. Why?
ITEM#4:
You are correct, very few of the UBB default settings have been changed. Why?
ITEM#5:
The UBB feature which sends email messages to Forum users (e.g. "Welcome To The Forum", "Notify Me When New Messages Are Posted", and "Your Password Is" etc) does not work. Why?
ITEM#6:
Both sg and yourself are correct, the Search feature has intentionally not been enabled. Why?
ITEM#7:
The name of the shareware which runs the new BEA Forum is "InfoPop UBB" and currently costs $500 to register (BTW, this price goes up at the end of this month). If you install UBB without registering it, not all of its features will be available and you don't get product support.
CONCLUSION:
Adding up just the evidence above, IMHO this suggests there is a registration problem.