@ben_dajao: The plugin expressly does not do permanent replacement, so it must remain activated.
Changing data globally in the database can result in some unintended text replacements, so it’s safest for the plugin not to do it. Also, depending on the size of the site’s data and the nature of the site’s hosting environment, it may not complete in a timely enough fashion, leaving the data in an unknown state (and the replacement process may not be able to safely be run again, depending on the replacements that were defined).
In short, there’s a lot of risk to do in a general-use way in a plugin and isn’t something I set out to do with it. The plugin could certain be used by another script or plugin to iterate through all posts on the site, call the plugin’s function to handle text replacements, and then save the posts back to the database. But that’s an exercise left to someone else.
If you have access to a web interface for your database (such as through phpMyAdmin in your hosting account’s cPanel (or similar)), you could directly run an SQL statement to permanently replace text (Google would help you find the specifics).
