I think everyone who runs a large forum with tons of posts runs into that problem sooner or later: when do I start deleting old stuff to give the server more breathing space?
It's not uncommon to have a posts table that takes up 500 megs, making it by FAR the largest table in the entire database.
Maybe Rick and all of us here can come up with a good way to maintain a large board without having to keep all the old posts in the main database, but also without erasing them completely (I recall that Classic allowed a user to export/archive topics that could be imported back at a later date).
What if instead of pruning topics (which you would still be able to do) you could "archive" topics into another database table (w3t_ArchivePosts.sql)?
These topics would then not burden the main posts table (making the forums run faster) and would only be available via the search function.
Any other ideas on how to tackle this issue?
