Pruning PMs over one year old - Harry Potter discussion forum for movies, books, and more!

Hi everyone!

We've been working on finding ways to avoid slow-downs of the Lounge due to the large size of our database while affecting you all as little as possible. We've decided to slim down the size of the area that stores old PMs, since that's one area where things that are no longer needed could be removed.

We will be removing ONLY PMs older than one year; no PMs that were sent more recently than that will be touched. We will not be doing any removal before the night of July 7th, which is exactly two weeks from today.

It is recommended that anyone who wants to save their PMs export them via e-mail. Here's how:

Go to this link in your control panel.
Set "Archive from which folder?" to "Inbox" if you want to archive only messages you received, "Sent Items" if you want to archive only messages you sent, or "All Folders" to archive everything
Set "Archive messages received in the last" to "365 days and older".
Set "Number of messages to archive" to "500"
Set "Delete messages after archiving?" to "Yes"
Set "Compile datafile as" to whichever choice suits you (we recommend the HTML file unless you are importing your PMs into Google Docs).
Click the "Process" button.
You should receive them sent as an attachment to the e-mail address you used to register on the Lounge. Remember that it takes time for our server to format them, so it probably won't be instantaneous.

If you think that you will need easy access to your old PMs in the future, we recommend using Google Docs to store them. You can export them as "Importable MS Excel datafile" and then import them into Google Docs as a spreadsheet. From there, you can access them from any computer, share it with other people if you want, export it as a PDF, HTML, or Excel file, print it, or edit it for your own personal use. All that's needed is a Google/Gmail account. See here for more help with importing/exporting in Google Docs.

EDIT: We've finished the removal! Everything seems to have worked perfectly.

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To read up on what we're doing for the fifth anniversary of the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, click here.

--The Leaky Crew

This post has been edited by NickTLC: Jul 8 2008, 11:25 PM