The "drain topic" feature is very useful. It is the only way I've found to manageably follow posts on this site without having to sift through dozens or hundreds of posts in a day that I don't have interest in. But, there's a problem.

In most cases, I drain a topic not because it's objectionable or anything like that, but because it simply doesn't meet the bar for following at the moment. Some of these topics, I would still possibly want to revisit later, should I find myself in need of technical advice addressed in the topic.

I can use Bing or Google to search the site and find topics like these, provided that the topic can be found based strictly on a keyword or phrase search. But it means I sacrifice being able to use the specialized search features on the site, such as searching by machine or user.

I assume that many people would prefer for drained topics to remain drained and not show up in searches. So I don't expect to see the default behavior changed.

But it would be really nice if the search features -- both the quick access search on any given topic page, as well as the main search feature -- would include a checkbox that disables for that search only the hiding of the drained topics.