Important: This document applies to Discus Professional 3.0, 3.01, and 3.10 only. The Archive Manager function in Discus Professional 4.0 and higher has been enhanced substantially, adding many features that obviate the need to answer the questions below. Users of Discus Professional 3.X are encouraged to upgrade.

Maintenance Notice: Discus 3.10 has been out of support since 2002. This document is retained for historical purposes but is no longer maintained.

• What does automatic archiving do?
• What does manual archiving do?
• Where does archiving put its archives?
• Why doesn't manual archiving/pruning write my archive.txt file?
• Why doesn't manual archiving do anything?
• Why doesn't manual archiving re-archive archives?
• Why doesn't archiving move subtopics?

Automatic archiving is intended to keep the number of posts displayed in a conversation within limits set by the board administrator. It keeps conversations from growing too long, even if they receive several posts. When a conversation reaches a pre-defined length (set in Archive Manager), some of the older messages are deleted (pruned) or moved into archive conversations (archived).

Manual archiving is intended to allow an administrator to clean up a board that has grown out of control. It manages older messages, posted before the time period selected in the Archive Manager. When a conversation contains both older and newer messages than the date, those conversations are archived. If pruning is selected, all messages older than the selected date are removed.

Archives are created as subtopics within the conversations where the messages were originally posted. The archives are named "Archive through --------" where the date of the last message posted is filled in onto the subject line.

Your archive.txt file has the sole purpose of storing your settings for automatic archiving and pruning. Manual archiving and pruning do not use or write to this file.

This is one of the most commonly asked questions to our support division. If you run a manual archiving operation over the last 30 days, any messages posted prior to the 30 day cutoff are archived.

However, if a conversation consists entirely of messages posted before that 30 day period, nothing is done. This is because this would be a pointless activity. If archiving were to do its operation, the page that originally hosted the messages would consist only of one subtopic, "Archive through --------" and an "Add a Message" box. There would be no messages on that page! Furthermore, no new replies to the messages in that conversation could be posted within the archive.

If a conversation contains messages posted before the cutoff and messages posted after the cutoff, then archiving moves the older messages into an archive conversation, leaving the new messages within the conversation.

If your board does not have any conversations meeting the criteria of the previous paragraph, then manual archiving won't do anything.

Archives are not re-archived to prevent the message depth from growing pointlessly.

Archiving moves only messages in version 3.X. In version 4.0+, archiving can move subtopics.