[SandsUSA]

Originally Posted by Sal Collaziano

That might not be a bad idea, Reeve of Shinra..

And regarding the 'rights' issue, maybe the flat html files could be located within the forum they were archived from - somehow. I'm not too sure how PHP and MySQL work so I don't know the limitations. But if they could be stored in the same area as the forum with the permissions they have to see them - it would be okay...

That's fine if you want to have them searchable through "normal" searches... But personally, I'd like it completely exported to external files. That way, I could ZIP them up and allow them for download (maybe the download link in the forum home page for each formum). If a user wants to search, let 'em download the zip and use text searches.

I know this topic comes up now and again, and nobody wants to do it , but my database can't grow forever! Right now, I'm selectively pruning and that's a pain - not to mention NO archived threads is FAR worse than download/text-searching.