I mean, we have threads that no one has posted to in years. Why keep them around? Why maintain profiles of people who haven’t posted in years, either?
I’ve had enough problems with this Board running slow because of it’s inadequate server. Wouldn’t deleting all threads more than, say, 6 months old and all profiles that have gone unused in at least one year help?
I believe we covered this before. If you search the archives, you’ll find the answer.
That’s why… 
Zev Steinhardt
Okay, I understand that. But is it really necessary to go back so far? I mean, does anyone even remember threads from, say, 1999? Or even 2001? Who is going to pull thiose up and refer to them now? If we made the cutoff a year or even six months, I’ll bet it would take care of 99.9% of all the thread searches people do.
Threads don’t take up all that much. I mean, you could probably fit the entire archives onto a couple of CDs, I’ll bet. And obsolete profiles could probably go on a few floppies. I don’t think that memory is the issue.
Yesterday I seached for a post of mine that it turned out was from two years ago. It was for MPSIMS, so it wasn’t really important, but it was nice to have.
Ah, well in that case, yesterday I searched for a post of mine that was three years old and from General Questions. 
Hah! When I was young, we had to search for ten year old posts, and we didn’t have search engines, either, we had to use candles and read through old file folders.
Some threads are popular due to topics that happened at the time. For example, if I wanted to re-hash the whole Bush/Gore election debate on this board, I’d need to pull up the threads from 2000. True, there are some later, post-SCOTUS decision threads on this topic (including one this past week), but hindsight makes people think differently. It’s very entertaining to go back and see what people were thinking at the time (as opposed to now, when we’ve had over two years to reflect on it).
Likewise, threads that deal with the September 11 attacks. I know, for example, I’d hate to lose Cartooniverse’s excellent thread Everything Changed Cartooniverse is an EMT who was at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
What if, five years from now, I want to go back and read the threads that dealt with the fall of Bahgdad? I’d need the threads from today to do that.
In addition, it helps to be able to research positions that a Doper may have taken in the past. I know that I recently debated *Jodi in a thread and referenced to her a thread from a debate that we had nearly two years earlier. Having that available to me was a help. Just to drive the point home (and to illustrate that I have no life), I routinely go over old threads from debates that I participated in from time to time.
As for why “inactive” accounts aren’t deleted, why should they be? Not posting is not grounds for having your posting privliges revoked. I know that I’ve taken leaves of absences from these boards for a month or two at a time (not that anyone noticed 
), but I was happy to have the ability to rejoin the board when I was ready.
Zev Steinhardt
That’s nothing. When I was little, we didn’t even have posts, or candles, or file folders. We had to memorize entire threads by heart. And we were happy too…
Zev Steinhardt
Oh yeah? When I was young, we didn’t even have memory. We had to be content with the knowledge we posted funny, intelligent, and informative posts.
Would there be some way to isolate the old threads so they didn’t effect performance now? Put them in separate read-only forums, for example?
I did a hack for tForum like that, which would allow the administrator to archive messages before any arbitrary number of days old. It didn’t do much for database size (ok, it actually made it slightly bigger, because of the duplicate table structures), but it really enhanced performance on larger boards.
Currently vB does not allow for archiving per se. And we’re not willing to hack the system much; it takes too much work to maintain and reinstall when needed.
While we do have quite a bit of old stuff, I have been told it does not overly affect board performance. What is causing the slowdowns you may have been experiencing is just plain ol’ other people, hundreds and hundreds of people trying to do the very same thing you’re doing, reading the board, writing to the board, making searches. Those are all far more intensive than holding any material would ever be.
Just speaking personally, I’d love to see everything six months old and beyond in “read-only” mode. And some day, that might even happen. But not right now.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
You were lucky, when I were a lad, we had to deliver our messages on foot, nineteen miles it were, uphill both ways.
in the snow!
Aye, except it weren’t just the snow we had to endure, it were also the terrible heat.
Another reason for keeping old user accounts… Suppose there was a poster named, say, WallyM7, who was prolific and funny and well-liked. And suppose then that WallyM7 died. Now after 6 months or a year or whatever the time limit is, his profile is cleared. Suddenly the name WallyM7 is free, and some other unknowing newbie registers and WallyM7 and starts posting. Can you imagine the grief, headaches, and general confusion and bickering this would cause? The same applies to the dozens (hundreds?) of names of banned trolls, some of them infamous.
Also, the way the board works, the poster names are checked against the database. You can see, for example, old threads before the swap to vB that have that field blank. This is from posters who did not reregister, and their names now are missing from the posts, or they are listed as guests.
So to prevent name recycling, and to keep the posts running smooth, and to keep up with the banned, the old profiles remain.
You had feet?! Dayum!
If you ever get to that point, it’s easy to do. A single SQL command and jdavis can do it.
You wouldn’t need an SQL command at all. Just PHP code to check the last post date against the current date and disallow replying if the difference is more than 6 months. It would just be a copy-and-paste with slight modification of the code fragment that disallows replying to a closed topic.