It's not that big of a deal, but when your topic IDs approach 19,000 when you only have 3,000 topics... it looks kind of dumb. The trash can is a big help, every time a post is deleted, it's turned into a topic.

Is there any way to configure a database to reuse unused IDs?; same with Forums, Usergroups and Skins? It would be nice to get back to Usergroup ID 16, not 39. I know you can manually change Usergroup IDs (safer when no one exists in the group).

I don't expect that we would ever do this, there's too many possibilities for it to go wrong and there's no danger to having a long topic id.

Why would you want to? They're nothing more than just numbers which are more important internally anyways.

Also with a higher topic #, that in itself can be said to show more board activity. What board do you think has had more business, ones with the highest topic number is 1000, or 10000?

You could always alter the table to adjust the current auto_increment value.

Although, as I'm sure you'll hear from everyone who reads this - you seriously don't want to ;)
As an analogy - when someone's phone line is disconnected, they don't reassign that number to someone else - same principle.

As an analogy - when someone's phone line is disconnected, they don't reassign that number to someone else - same principle.

Weak analogy - it is reassigned with a minimum wait of three months (usually more).

I prefer the analogy of a credit card number. It is never re-assigned after cancellation.

I prefer the analogy of a credit card number. It is never re-assigned after cancellation.

How about social security numbers.. Once the owner expires, they don't reassign the number (or at least they're not supposed to).

Not to mention search engines would get very confused when the content of post ID X suddenly changed after a while.