New Message Archive areas

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Today we've set up the new message archive areas, which you can see at the bottom of the main Forum page.

Until the end of this month, the Archive areas will be open for the membership to rummage through. The topics and messages that have been moved there had all already been closed for at least a year (topics normally auto-close when there have been no postings to them for three months). They have all been marked as read-only: no new replies can be added to them while they're in the archive.

On September 1, the Archive areas will go subscription-only. Members who want to access archived messages after that will need to subscribe to the new Premium Content system: a three month subscription to the Archival areas will cost USD $15.00. The subscriptions will enable us to keep all those extra messages by having the people interested in them be the ones to help to bear the cost. (Members subscribing to early new-chapter access will also be able to combine Archive access with their subscription if they want to, for a reduced price.)

Until September 1, members who find a specific thread they're interested in moving out of the archive and re-opening should contact one of the moderators about it. (Don't go crazy, guys: we'll be allowing a total of no more than 2000 messages to be moved...so choose carefully.)

Please also note that after September begins, we will be depending on member subscription fees to keep the archived messages in place. If not enough members subscribe to "pay the way" of the archived messages, we will -- reluctantly -- start the process of deleting the oldest messages, starting with those posted during 2002.

Thanks, all.

[EricG1793]

I was just looking at the archives, and is there any way to organize them in to the categories they were in? Say, I go in to the archived books discussion, all the archived topics are in one big list. Is there a way to organize them in to the sub-forums, like the active threads are?

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Originally posted by EricG1793:
I was just looking at the archives, and is there any way to organize them in to the categories they were in? Say, I go in to the archived books discussion, all the archived topics are in one big list. Is there a way to organize them in to the sub-forums, like the active threads are?

While this could be done, because of the way our forum software works, it would take hours and hours of labor.

It has to be said that our forum stats show that less than 5% of these 12,000 archived messages have been viewed by anyone in the Forums in the last year. So I'm not willing to ask my mods to spend hours of work sorting them.

At the moment, the smartest thing for interested parties to do is to use the "Search" facility to find and view messages that interest them. At a later date, if there's enough demand for it, we can start gradually building a duplicate set of Archive Forum structures to match the active Forums.