Guys, thank you for confirming what I was seeing.
I wonder how we might escalate this concern to some level of administration who could possibly look into addressing it?
Surely this change was not intentional, anyone who uses any forums regularly knows that users are always encouraged to search for previous posts that may answer their questions, rather than creating new (and possibly duplicate) threads. If you ever post a question on one of the Microsoft / Windows forums, you quickly get a flood of harsh responses asking if you tried searching past threads first.
