i remember the old archive had some kind of addon that allowed direct access to the archive aswell
1 . The vbulletin on and off.gifs on forum home were turned into the direct link to the archive
same was done for forum display
and again the same for the thread itself
in the thread link said >> link to the archived post here
or something similar
oh yeh i found it now
this addon for the vbhome lite search indexer was great
found in this
post
wondering if it could be done for vbulletins indexer as my vbulletin 3 indexer is indexing all my posts like mad
but its weird coz my friend owns a really busy site yet none of his archived posts are getting indexed so i bet this new hack will fix it for him