I have one major complaint and several suggestions about archiving.

The complaint is that archived posts no longer contribute to the post counts listed on the main forum page. So if you archive 15+ years of really old posts, it makes your forums look much less active than they actually are. That might seem like a silly complaint, but those post counts are a big part of the first impression made to potential new members and sponsors. I want to see those numbers go up, not down.

Other Suggestions:

Make it so we can archive an entire forum, regardless of when the contents were posted. Sometimes a forum needs to be retired, or it was temporary to begin with. Right now, we handle this by changing permissions. That works, but telling a member they don't have permission to post in a forum sends a different message than telling them it has been archived. Archiving seems like it could be a more appropriate solution.

Create options for archiving to also resize images. For current posts, I don't like to have a size limit on my image uploads. It's 2025, I should be able to zoom into nose hairs if I want to. However, after a post is old and archived, I don't mind if the original image and thumbnails get resized to save space and bandwidth.

If archiving were to resize images, it would make sense to be able to archive image galleries also.

Remove the 'Reply to this topic' button at the top of archived topics. The button does nothing when you click on it. Also, remove the Quote and MultiQuote links. These should probably be considered a bug.

Thanks

Chirs

I don’t really use the archive option, I come from an era where we did that manually. Manually making an archive forum, moving content to there (possibly with topic multi tools, don’t recall the name on Invision at the moment, would need to look it up), just keeping it clean. Doesn’t change numbers, doesn’t do weird stuff.

I've always been dissapointed with the archive feature and don't use it simply because the content may as well not exist; it doesn't show up in the search results so its only any good for browsing and finding via an external search tool like Google etc.

If you move the content to dedicated archive forum area and lock it, it still counts as member content and is searchable and shows up via tags. Basically the feature was crippled when they discounted archived content from internal search, which I only learnt some time after using it and then having to reverse it. Strangely it doesn't warn you clearly this side effect will happen in the AdminCP archive settings page first or at least it didn't when I use it.

I agree, archived topics missing from internal search is a problem. I think it would be better if the titles of archived topics could still be searched, if not the whole body. By omitting topics, the best way to search is to go to google.

Also, the archive settings page in the ACP says "When your community reaches a certain size, archiving of older topics will be required." It seems like the archiving function hasn't been fully thought out yet and its too soon to start requiring it. I hope there are enhancements coming down the pipe.