John,

Let me explain what is happening. First off, nothing is wrong, that is the way it is supposed to work.

The old bb was set to move a post to the archives whenever it was the 501st post. Every new post would knock of the oldest post.

Each message is a seperate file on the computer. One of the pieces of data within the file is a pointer to the message number that that particular post was a reply to, if it was a reply. Another part of the data stored within each file was the message numbers of any posts that were replies to it.

Whenever someone replied to a post, the post that recieved the reply was opened and the number of the reply was added to the data, then the file was saved again. That would give the file a new creation date. The old software used the creation date of the file to determine the date of the message. That had the effect of moving the files date up the ladder if someone replied to it, even though the real date of the original message hadn't changed.

The new software works with a real database to keep the original date of the file intact. So, when someone replies to a message, the software knows that the date of the message that was replied to hasn't really changed. Since we all have our preferences set to to view just a certain number of days worth of messages, the main index file might very well show a reply but not show the message that was replied to.

But, when you read the reply, you will see the the list of all messages in the thread so that if you need to refer back to the original message you are easily able to.

Because the new software is so efficient, I am able to keep more messages on the board at a time. For example, right now we have around 1500 messages available for viewing without having to refer to the archives. I plan to keep somewhere around that figure on the board at all times and be able to cut down the number of archives to 3 or so instead of the 10 that we have now.

You should still keep your preferences set to 2 or 3 days to get maximum performance when viewing the board, just remember that there are several more days right there for the viewing if you need to.

Greg