If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
Editors may have already noticed this while editing. Regular readers will certainly be hampered by the loss of auto-suggested choices while searching. It seems to be having the most profound effect upon mobile users — which is somewhat ironic, since auto-suggest doesn't work in the same way on wikiamobile. I'm personally getting a ton of 404 "Page not found" errors on wikiamobile because of this change.
The good news is that Wikia are essentially tearing down auto-suggest in order to build it back, better than ever. Hopefully, this means that we're soon getting true auto-suggest on wikiamobile and that the auto-suggest for desktops will be much more responsive than it has been.
As of today, there is no ETA on the return of auto-suggest, but its return will be incremental. When it does pop back up, expect its functionality to be volatile like regular searching has been.
Nevertheless after it does return, please feel free to send in Special:Contact/bug reports if you notice problems. The time to influence the feature's development is when it initially returns.
So far, there's not really a central hub for discussing changes to auto-suggest, but I'd expect a staff blog post to appear on community:blog:Wikia Staff Blog wihin the next few days.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ <span style="">21:23: Tue 22 May 2012
- Auto-suggest has returned today, but it's stripping the namespaces from its suggestions, which is creating a great deal of confusion. Essentially the search bar currently does not distinguish between River Song, Talk:River Song and Howling:River Song. Obviously, this makes searching much less useful than it was, but this is a temporary condition. Please see community:forum:Namespace Link Glitches.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ <span style="">17:27: Wed 23 May 2012