[edburke]

After checking the monthly stats, a pattern has started to emerge. The new member and total posts counts have stayed at a relatively consistent level (about 50-75 new members and 7000 posts per month), but the site's bandwidth use has consistently risen. This indicates that the board is becoming cluttered with old topics that the system has to deal with to work properly. The search function has to parse everything and this results in longer searches and more server resources being used.

I haven't done a cleanup on the board in over 2 years, trying to leave everything up as long as possible without taxing the resources, but that day has come. I have created a new forum called Old Topic Purgatory where any topic over 90 days old with no newer replies have been moved to. This is a temporary forum, and all contents of the forum will be deleted on November 1st. The only forums that weren't pruned were the "Members' Rigs/Restoration Projects" and the "Firehouse Kitchen", as those are relatively small, and likely to still be positively utilized.

For the record, there were 7,911 Topics with 134,633 replies for a total of 142,544 posts that fall into the "over 90 days with no new posts" category. The forum was created to allow people to review the contents and save anything they may want. The deletion will occur on November 1st, without exception. I wish I could keep everything online forever, but this is a necessary evil to keep the board operating at peak performance.