We cannot and do not speak for the Reader in any capacity in this situation.
We also can’t speak as to what decisions they might make in reference to their property.
Let Jerry have a chance to do what he needs to do technically for this site and then once the upgrade and etc. is done, that would be the best time to revisit this issue – if the situation remains to be addressed that would be the time to do it.
Until we are at that place it’s all speculation at best, which is not useful.
That seems a resonable enough plan.
I take it that the missing posts are being kept somewhere safe? At least in the short term even if there’s no guarentee of them being put back online.
Before I write what I wanna write about what Jerry said, I have to say something and I don’t care if it comes off as craven ass-kissing.
–Up on Soap Box. This is a volunteer-driven organization. Jerry is not employed as our personal I.T. guy- and it’s pretty nifty that he puts in as much time and effort as he does. The fact that we now pay to play blurs that line- but as those of us who were Members before the Pay to Play era will recall, even when it was for free there were complaints from the customers.
The Mods, Admin and other sundry folks who keep the machine going do so because they believe in the Straight Dope. Many of us do. Personally, I’m only a Member but yanno, I do love this place. I learn things on a daily basis- not only factual bits that serve to keep my dullard’s brain churning but things about my fellow humans. That kind of illumination ( Illuminati?? 
) is only a good thing. We are due a certain level of service, but this is NOT a business that exists solely to serve us. Rather, it has appeared to me since we went to Pay to Play that we were paying for just what the payment page says we are due, and nothing more. Splitting hairs over " we will try, and we hope , and we will " is a valid debate- but I would ask that we keep the civility level high. Our pleasures are served by volunteers. Our fees go to hardware, not a high lifestyle for those with tags after their Member names.
–Off Soap Box
So. My quote up there. This one fact jumped out at me. As it currently exists, our hardware can currently store 2.4 Gigs of old stuff. I will admit a near-total ignorance of how such storage works, but I do know this- I can buy a 100 Gig HD at Staples for under $ 100.00. If I thought it would solve the problem, I’d send Jerry that HD today. Seriously.
What am I missing here? Is it literally a storage issue? Will the new servers be making use of a RAID or other HD storage array that allows for a healthy Straight Dope, and a reasonable influx of new posts for say, the next 5-10 years?
I suspect that just as quite a few of us realize that for our fifteen bucks a year we are getting a bargain, quite a few of us would gladly organize the donation of some storage hardware to solve this problem.
I also suspect I’m gonna get flamed for saying that, but that doesn’t bother me. For a hunnerd bucks, we can have storage space…roughly… 40 times of what the servers can currently store and serve up when searched.
That, it seems to me, is some serious freakin’ value.
Cartooniverse
I think what you are missing is the fact that the database is software and not the same thing as a hard drive. As far as I can tell, vBulletin is an application that requires a database engine. The engine currently being used limits the size of the bulletin board. No matter how large the hard drive is, the database is the limiting factor (if I’m reading correctly). I’ve run into this problem with other applications. The solution, it seems, is to switch to a new database engine. But I suspect that is much easier said than done.
No flaming from me, I loved what you said in the upper part.
From what I can glean, the limitation is not a matter hardware and a new hard drive. But some limitation with the configuration of either the database or the vBulletin software itself. Minor note, server hard drives are usually 2-3 times more expensive than what you would buy for yourself at Comp USA. Still a bargain, if that was the only problem.
Jim
I had no idea, thank you for the illumination. Live and loin. 
Cartooniverse, my WAG is that the number of bits allocated in the SQL software and/or SQL program versions are the limiting factors, not the hard storage space. If you can’t address it, you can’t store it, or at least you can’t retrieve it.
Remember the 2GB limit in older Win/DOS versions? The hard drives were bigger than that, but the opsys couldn’t address it, so you had to break drives up into partitions. And while any program can theoretically work across partitions if designed to do so, it is a heavy burden to bear if there are better solutions around the corner, like increasing the allocation for addressing bits.