Archive Boards

[Joshua Farrell]

Archive boards are either an individual board, or a group of boards people use to move old inactive threads into. The most common reasoning for this is to keep their active boards within a forum neat and organized. This is also done to prevent old topics from being bumped up, as most archive boards are read only boards.

Pros:
As mentioned above, using archive boards on your forum can keep your boards organized with only active threads. Also as mentioned above, this can help prevent the bumping of old, sometimes out of date topics. Many forums have a rule about bumping old threads, so an archive board is more efficient and tidy than locking or deleting old threads (especially the latter if the admin is concerned about overall forum post count).

Cons:
There is no universal rule that says the bumping of old topics are a bad thing. It really depends on the nature of the topic as well as the nature of the post that bumps it back up. For example, if you run a forum themed after Spongebob Squarepants, a member may have created a poll on which season was their favorite. After activity in that thread dies, it may be 6 months before someone else finds it and decides to start up the conversation again, which helps the activity on your forum.

There are pros and cons to just about everything in life, light to dark, good to evil, Star Trek to Star Wars, Ying to Yang, so what is your opinion on the use of archive boards?

 

[Kane]

Well, my forums are small. The biggest forum I own has just 2k posts. Therefore I have not started sending topics to the archived section. However, if you own a forum that has hundreds of thousands of threads, this will be a good option.