[Cyrus]

I think someone already wrote this, but here's my two cents:

You need to separate the chuff (eg jokes, silly comments, irrelevant sub-threads, flames, etc) from the good stuff (the poker content). This means a daily job of monitoring the boards and marking the worthwhile posts & threads. (You can be alerted to worthwhile posts by readers, as well: "Hey, Chuck, I think the above post by XYZ deserves to be archived".)

Since you have not done this up to now, you will need to treat it the archiving as a Project. Assign this to someone, have him look over all the old posts, and to pick a large list of those he thinks are wirth it. Then he turns them over to the webmaster(s) who have final say.

The good stuff is archived, in proper thread mode, and the rest is totally junked.

ONE MORE THING ABOUT IMPROVING CLARITY IN THREADS: You have a default mode whereby the title of Post A, the post you are responding to, is repeated int he title of post B, the response post. This is bad for clarity. When you have a thread with fifty posts, all titled "Re: Poker hand discussion", you are left with two options to get the best information: Read all the posts (time consuming) or read the posts written by reknown posters (robs you of the potential good input provided by relative unknowns).

SUGGESTION : Make it the default mode that people have to write in the title. You will soon see the posts and the threads get a lot clearer. (And you will see that this will also make it a little easier when wading through the chuff in order to find the archiving-worthy posts.)

Compare these two hypothetical threads for clarity:

CURRENT SYSTEM :

Poker hand discussion wanted - PkerPlyr
---Re: Poker hand discussion wanted - MMMMMMM
------Re: Poker hand discussion wanted - Ray Zee
---Re: Poker hand discussion wanted - Ray Zee
------Re: Poker hand discussion wanted - Mason Malmuth
---Re: Poker hand discussion wanted - George

PROPOSED SYSTEM :

Poker hand discussion wanted - PkerPlyr
---Were you playing at the Taj? - MMMMMMM
------I guess Donald would be pleased! - Ray Zee
---You played it wrong - Ray Zee
------This is already covered in Poker Essays II- Mason Malmuth
---I was your dealer at that table- George