Oh no!
YaBB is such a fantastic program I can't believe there's no way to archive threads when they're too old to keep in the active boards. Most of our discussions involve motorcycle tech talk and I'm seeing a wonderful resource of mechanical information and advice being thrown away daily. Admins will find that with a popular forum it's not feasible to never delete the old post.
For me, and I think, anyone trying to build a substantial web resource, something that created permanent HTML files would be the only realistic approach. These "real pages" can be spidered and listed in the search engines, something vitally important to a site's success. Even if it created the archived or old post on the fly it would be better than loosing all that valuable information every time the old post are deleted. However...
on the fly seems like a heavy task for a system when the database gets really large.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be a pretty simple job to take the old post and write them to a file in a www folder instead of just deleting them? I suspect setting the search program to include the archived pages wouldn't be too difficult as well. I might be able to do that but obviously I'm no programmer.
Without the ability to save data separate from the active threads, it's impossible to build a substantial reference/resource with YaBB! 
For me, learning this sux because YaBB has really helped our site's numbers!!
Thanks for any and all comments and I'm willing to help in any way possible.
Thanks!