I notice many older forum topics available a year ago are missing. Using the search to find them under a new URL has been frustrating because of the 60 second search limit and 4 character words or more. The word "mod" is very popular in Topic titles and can't be used in searches because of its length.

Any ideas on how to find these older topics? Are they deleted after a period of time?


Suggestion for Forum Admin, if your are requiring a minimum of 4 character words in searches, you should require all Forum Topics to use 4 or more character words.

Thats stupid request. All searches on forums I have been to require 4 letters or more. I haven't seen one that is 3 letters or less. All old thread disappear, takes too much space and lagging and will cause unnecessary thread necromancy.

The forums gets 'pruned' on a fairly regular basis. The more active a forum is, the more often it gets pruned. Generally, topics that are over six months old, with no new posts, are in serious danger of going into the bit bucket.

Whic is why it's a good idea to copy & paste any threads you don't want to die to your harddrive.

1. The forums are periodically pruned of older threads, so chances are the thread may simply not exist any more. It's best to save to your harddrive the threads you want to keep.
2. It's a standard among modders here to prefix threads with [relz] and [wipz] to allow them to be searched by the search engine. It is not sensible to call your thread "mod" - but a search on e.g. "[RELZ] Oscuro" should bring up what you're looking for.

Since this is off-topic for this board, I'm happy to answer further questions via PM, but best to lock this up now.