The limit was 5000, it was lowered to 500 for performance reasons for the UI. If you really need 5000 results at a time, use the API as I suggested in 106553. Suggesting WONTFIX.

yann.ckschm.tt wrote:

I don't experience any performance problems even on my weak-chested tablet (of course, a page with 2000 results takes longer to load than one with 20, but it's still faster than a recent changes page of the same size or e.g. any Wikidata item page with more than a handful of statements).

I don't want to use the API (probably including the need to develop a tool on my own to display the result in a readable and useful way, just like the ordinary search result page) for things that the UI could do once, and only have been removed because someone decided that it is not useful to me.

Where's the benefit of taking this possibility away? It's not even like it would be a pitfal for newbies, as the pagination links only offer page sizes of up to 500 anyway and who changes it in the URL manually knows what he does.

Completely agree with YMS.

Reverted my older change.