I really like a lot of thinks about vBulletin, but sometimes I just have to shake my head and say what were they thinking?

I kinda like the hybrid mode for threads, but it can be a real mess when you have more than a couple dozen responses-- there's always that "more replies below current depth..." and if you click on it, you scroll up and your place in the thread list window gets lost.  OK, this gets really bad when you try to search for something within the thread.

Here's what happened: I was searching for a particular string and one of the results was a thread with 220 responses.  I knew this was hopeless because I would have to visually scan dozens of pages for this search string.  But then I thought I was saved, because vBulletin provides a way to search within a thread for a string.  So I did that. Bad news:  it will only show you the specific messages that have the string, and completely out of context.  All I knew was the date and time of the messages with the search string.  So then I went back to hybrid viewing mode and tried to find these specific messages based on their post dates.  Forget it!  I could NOT find them, primarily because of the old "more replies below current depth...".  If those replies were really there, I just couldn't find them.

Someone ought to task the folks at vBulletin to do this a few times... I'm sure they will THEN come up with a better search mechanism because this just sucks!  Here's an idea:  when searching for a string, and you get a few threads that contain it, the thread view will show the individual replies that have the search string using a different color, and lastly, there should be an option to expand all threads instead of this horrendous partially collapsed mode. In other words, it will automatically search within each thread for the search string and all you have to do is scroll through the list of threads to see which ones have it.