Title: I was searching for an issue on gitlab.com just now, and noticed I couldn&#x27;t search any project&#x27;s issue tracker without signing in: a banner says &quot;You must sign in to search for specific terms.&quot; To reproduce, simply open <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues&#x2F;</a> in a private browsing session and try to search for any term.<p>I&#x27;m shocked by the user hostility. There&#x27;s zero chance I&#x27;m going to move my open source projects to gitlab.com if users can&#x27;t even search the issue tracker without creating a GitLab account and signing in. Truly baffling decision.<p>I was so shocked I dug deeper and tracked down the offending code and MRs that introduced them (appreciate the ability to do this, I&#x27;ll give them that). This is controlled by a feature flag :disable_anonymous_search and manifests as &lt;div class=&quot;js-issues-list&quot; data-is-anonymous-search-disabled=&quot;true&quot; ...&gt; in rendered HTML. Relevant MRs from 10 months ago:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;merge_requests&#x2F;70223" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;merge_requests&#x2F;70223</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;merge_requests&#x2F;70249" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;merge_requests&#x2F;70249</a><p>I don&#x27;t see any justification given, but the former MR says &quot;Related to #340716&quot; which doesn&#x27;t link to anywhere, and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues&#x2F;340716" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab&#x2F;-&#x2F;issues&#x2F;340716</a> is 404, so maybe something internal?<p>The feature flag also doesn&#x27;t appear to be default-on for self-hosted instances.<p>Edit: Removed a potentially controversial aside since I don’t want to steer the conversation that way.
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