I'm totally in agreement with the idea of an archive table. If done right the end user has no idea the messages are in a second table, are treated differently programatically, not should they.

Look, in a forum that has 276 pages of posts the average user will look at the first 10, occasionally the last 5, but almost never will they look at pages 15 through 270. So, why keep those in the primary posts table?

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