I would. Archiving is a great way to keep forums relevant and up-to-date, while still allowing old topics to be viewed by members. If Archived threads require reinstating, the thread owner could easily make an appeal upon his/her return, ensuring that truly dead threads remain so, while threads that are simply inactive for a long period are able to be accessed at a later time. Members returning from a long absence is reasonably rare, so I'd imagine that appeals for reinstatement would be likewise fairly infrequent.
Deciding the cutoff date between archiving and deleting is another matter entirely. I would advocate a year's inactivity before archiving, and a further two years before full purging - time enough for any useful information to be gleaned and added to the relevant sections while still keeping the forums current, up-to-date, and clutter free.
I'm enjoying this discussion
Please allow me to stand for the members who have or might one day return after a long absence.
As you can see under my avatar, I joined back in 2010. I was active for maybe the length of a year, but school really needed to become a priority and I had to shut down a lot of my activities, I even had to cut out videogames at one point. But you don't need my life story, you just need to know that I've sadly been on hiatus for at least 3 years, and now I'm back.
Maybe I don't deserve to talk and share due to not being around all the time, but in the times where I have been active, both before I took my leave and recently, I have done my best to not be an annoying noob and instead I've tried my best to assist everyone and be a contributing member. I reached infantryman by reading everything on the forums that I could and then sharing my knowledge to those who asked. That being said, having been on such a long hiatus, now that I have returned, I lost a lot of the knowledge that I had and at one point I was actually considering on asking for my infantryman status to be removed until I earned it again.
2010 was a great time to be a member, the level of activity around the forums was very high, and things were really fun.
After I've made my return, the forums seemed to be quite dead by comparison, it has seemed as though everyone had gone off to work on their own, using facebook primarily instead of the forums. I understand those who want to make a profit by creating models and selling them, that's fine, but it would still be nice to see them around here.
Random thought on that topic:
In fact.... maybe we could add a section of the forums where all the professional Prop Makers / Prop Studios / Dedicated Prop Teams (or whatever you might call them) have a section on the forums, probably under classifieds/marketplace where they can kinda host there own pages in a way. Maybe have catalog pages for their products rather than threads.
While I don't want to see them trying to market their products 24/7, it would be nice to find a way to get them to come back, having special pages for professional builders would be a nice way to do it I think.
Anyways...... I'm glad to see the spirit of the forum revive with Art coming in and taking over. It really is pleasant
Now, with all of that aside, onto the topic at hand.
I love the thought of archiving old threads, especially since when you archive things, they typically all get put into a folder/subforum when it happens. This is great, it prevents necro-ing while still allowing the information to be accessed (we do need to ensure that pictures/attachments and links get preserved though when threads get archived, it would be a shame to lose them).
I am curious though, what if an archived thread seems to be the only place to ask about a certain piece of information? Not as much so as a noob question, but there are a few instances where someone might build something in a certain way that you can't find anywhere else. Example:
How does Longshot-X attach his shotgun to the back of his torso? There are very few individuals that I have seen tackle the feat of attaching larger weapons to their armor, and I was wondering what all methods the individuals that did have used. Are there specific mounting points that would be better used with a Reach torso vs a Halo 3 Chief torso?
On another note, I just recently contacted Random Flying Pigeons, one of our female members who made a Jackal costume and a Grunt costume a long time ago, and I actually have a lot of information that I have been meaning to post in her old Jackal thread.
But maybe it would just be better for me to start a new thread for it, I'm not sure.
...actually, I think I might post my conversation with her in her thread, and then spawn a new thread dedicated to coming up with ideas on how to build a Point Defense Gauntlet (Jackal shield) and then point to her as a reference.
But, in instances were one of us might communicate with one of our long lost members, I do believe that it would be nice to come here and share an update on their story. I also think that the best place to do so would be to do it in their old threads.
If we are going to have certain time-frames in which things occur automatically, I suggest that we try to find certain ways to improve upon the system.
Rather than simply setting threads to become archived automatically after a year (actual period of time we could use could be different, it doesn't necessarily have to be 1 year) of inactivity, I suggest that instead, that the topic creator of the threads needs to have also not logged on in a year. If they do log in after a year's time after the items have been archived, I believe that what could happen is either their threads all get automatically unarchived (they do not appear as threads with new posts, and they do not appear at the top of any list until posted in) OR instead, they could remain in the archived section, but they could permit the TC to be the one and only person who can post in the threads. Upon posting in the thread, it would then become unarchived and alive again.
In terms of deleting old threads, go look around the forums. I'd say that the vast majority of useful content and creative ideas came from around 2008-2010.
When I do a search for ANYTHING, almost all if not 100% of the results I return have been inactive for at least 2 years.
I really think that deleting anything would be a disservice to the community.
Prior to this week, I think the forums have suffered 2 bad events, right? I would archive things in groups of when those instances occurred. There was the time when the forums were hacked and I think the other big schism was from a system transfer/upgrade or something, I'm not sure.
Since most of those threads have lost their images, it would fine to group them all together, but there are a few rare threads where individuals used photobucket to host their images, and I think an amendment might need to be made for them, or rather, have them listed in an archived group separate from the rest.
Moving all the older threads to archived subsections doesn't really clutter the forum up at all. Keeping really old ones in the archived subsections doesn't cause any much clutter either, especially if we created tags for all the old threads in order to help sort through them whenever we are looking for something. I've actually mentioned that before. I think it would be great to have something like ebay or newegg or a website that sells products. Everyone has seen the panel they have on the Left side of the pages that let you refine your searches. I think it would be superb to have something like that in order to refine our searches on the forums.
Lastly, I think that if/when the +1/Thanks/Thumbs Up buttons get added, they should also be added for the archived threads. In fact, it would be pretty nice to have a page somewhere on the forums that lists the top most Thumbs Up'd posts.
Cutting myself off before I ramble on.
Okay, 1 quick ramble...
I think an announcement should be made for all the Elite threads that have lost their pictures.
I'm sure some of you out there, like me, save pictures of things when you are like "omg cool".
As such, I'm sure that some of us might have pictures on our computers from those threads that lost their images.
It would be pretty cool to do what we can to restore some of the lost images.