Originally Posted by Bill

The "Archives" is a strange section. For the most part, it has nothing in it - there are no archives.

You may recall that in October 2004, the layout of the board changed as Chris converted it over to new and better board software. When the moment came for the cutover, Chris stashed all the posts up to that moment in a storage area called "Archives", to make sure they didn't get lost during the transition. The board then started all over, with zero posts, on the cutover date, using the new software and a greatly expanded and reorganized topics list.

Once the board had settled down with the new software, and the initial kinks had been worked out, the Moderators took on the task of moving the old posts individually out of the "archive" storage area, where they were pretty hard to find, and into their proper category on the new board. There were over 10,000 posts, as I recall. I also recall someone saying something like ;-) "I'd rather translate War and Peace out of the original Russian - after first learning Russian - than try to figure out where all those posts go, and then hafta move 'em." ;-) But the job was done over a period of time, and today all the posts live where they should. You can still recognize some of the old posts because they contain strange character strings like &amp* or &quot*, which are places where the character translation from the old board software to the new isn't perfect.

Thus most of the original "archives" are actually empty now. I think (but I am not sure) that as each archive topic was emptied out, Chris linked that topic back to main screen.

As an example, you can see that the Solar Power Forum has posts going back to July 2003. However, the Solar Power Forum wasn't even created until October 2004 - before then, any solar-power-related posts were scattered around the board in various disconnected places. The fact that those posts now appear properly in the Solar Power Forum shows that someone rummaged through the 10,000 posts in the Archive, identified the solar-related posts, and moved them into the proper place on the new main forum.

Hope that made sense.

At the bottom line, I don't think you are missing anything. It is all in the main forum.

Bill