To Prune or Not To Prune

How long should forum posts be made available?

[AdXChange]

My forum is just under 5,000 members with two or three times the amount of posts. Some categories obviously receive more traffic than others and those categories are getting exceedingly bulky. I currently remove posts older than 60 days but I was curious how often other forum admins or moderators prune their forums. Are there advantages to leaving them available? Any input is appreciated.

[Casethejoint]

Hey AdXChange. I've got threads going back to 2002 because they contain useful advice and information for our users. I guess it depends on the purposes of your site, and whether an informational legacy is important.

[AdXChange]

Good point. I wanted to create an urgency for members to reply before the post is gone and it works pretty well but at least 25% of the members think we should prune less often. Do you find that some of the information becomes dated?

[Casethejoint]

Sometimes, particularly with announcements or requests that are explicitly time dependent, for example assistance with research for a particular date, or a conference announcement. But a great deal of useful discussion can be generated by these kind of events though. Guess the question is how to ensure that the insights are not lost to all.

[vincevincevince]

Just take a look at forum 3 and forum 30 on this site ...

[NoLimits]

To me, pruning a forum is killing potential revenue.

Every page is waiting to be found in the SE's (if you can manage to get your forum deep-crawled.)

[rogerd]

By and large, I agree with NoLimits - why get rid of potentially useful content?

Your visitors can find older content useful, too - I often find myself referring to WebmasterWorld threads that are a year or two old, mostly to get obscure technical answers.

I suppose, though, it depends on the purpose of your forum. If it's a lot of chit-chat, and if you don't care about search engine traffic, then pruning will probably improve your forum performance.