Old data and threads are useful. Thank God for Deuce Bigalow over on Eraps; the keeper of the dead hobby scrolls. There is gold in them thar hills.
Fortunately for me, the guy that introduced me to ASPD gave me some good advice.
a) Shutup and do not argue back until I get a little mileage and get a feel for the board.
b) real OLD threads, especially from guys who obviously get a lot of respect from others or you think might have imparted some knowledge at some point.
Those 2 pieces of advice saved me a lot of grief.
Chevalier also posted some "collections of links" that have some classic posts, the best newbie info, and links to the best "HOW TO..." posts ever. Guys like him are the head librarians of the hobby. The threads are all the books.
Server space is cheap. If the owners are to be believed, they have migrated the site to some top tier servers and pipelines, so the additional data storage is inconsequential. It is not near as taxing as all the different widgets running on this site.
This site has more than 30,000 users registered and over 3,000 online here now and the site is running pretty damn smoothly. Here is a pic of the data center.
Some day, the older posts here will be valuable. It already is for some research. tracking gals rates or specials frequency....
data is valuable. Ask GOOGLE.