How to manage a growing forum?

[Lazorbeam]

Hi all,

I've been running a vbulletin forum for just over 4 years now. My forum has grown significantly and now has just over 1 million unique per year.

Over time the forum has become cluttered with tons and tons of old threads. Not only that, but users are also finding it hard to locate content via search etc.

How do you guys manage this? Here's what I have in mind so far;

1. Change the default view age for threads to ~45 days.
2. Force prefixes on thread creation in order to make sorting easy.
3. Move the thread filter box above the threads list.
4. Prune and archive old threads.

I'd LOVE to hear more feedback on how you guys manage growth. In particular, I'd be interested to see a simplified search because the default vbulletin search seems a bit too complex (I know it's an advanced search!).