Itinerant Lurker writes:
...it's now 72 pages long (1,068 posts) and the site admins are threatening to shut it down because it's becoming a server issue.
I wouldn't buy that reason if I were you. I followed the link you provided in
Message 1, and they're running vBulletin, probably the most robust bulletin board software out there. While poor database design could cause performance issues in long threads, this is very unlikely with vBulletin. One of their claims to fame is their ability to handle huge bulletin boards with hundreds of forums, thousands of threads, and millions and millions of messages. So vBulletin is unlikely to be the problem.
Another potential source of the problem is database size restrictions imposed by their server. Do they periodically have to delete threads or archive them to HTML? I see that they do have some archives, but only for three of their many forums. I would be very surprised if database size restrictions were an issue because their bulletin board already has 1,343,932 messages as of this writing. The thousand messages in your thread is less than 0.1% of the total and couldn't possibly be a significant problem.
My bet is that their wanting to shut down the thread has nothing to do with server issues.
--Percy