Question Need Archiving Advice

We currently have only one forum to which members can post messages and it currently contains over two years of threads. They claim they don't want the forum divided into categories (whatever... that's another topic for another time:) but I want to create an Archive of some kind to move some of the really old messages out.

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to do this?

Do I make another (separate) category or do I make the Archive a sub (child) category of our main forum?

I'd like to keep our main forum the only one that allows new posts and replies, but locking down the Archive might be inconvenient if someone wants to revive an old thread.

Is there a way to make replies to threads in a sub (child) category show up in their rightful place on the main (parent) category?

I hope I'm making some sense and I'm sorry if these questions sound really elementary.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

Sincerely, Katie

I suppose there are as many ways to go about this problem as there are minutes in a day. If I were in your situation, I would create sub-categories (like we have here at www.kunena.org ) with the title "xxxxxxxxxx - Archive" and you can move those old topics into the archive sub-category. If you want to prevent your users resurrecting those old topics, you could lock these archive sub-categories.

For the most part, we don't lock the archive sub-categories here at www.kunena.org . Instead, we use the category description to gently advise users how we intend these archive categories should be used.

katiepeters wrote:

Is there a way to make replies to threads in a sub (child) category show up in their rightful place on the main (parent) category?

No, not really. The ^NEW indicator is shown in the Recent Discussion view and that's possible the "rightful" place - we could have a whole discussion about that. There's a feature - we could again argue whether it's very good - to indicate (in the Index view) when new posts have been made in a sub-category by using a colored category icon. If you want to discuss this further we could do that offline (via Skype), say.