Hi there Shirls, (topic has been moved to General Questions)
Sorry but yes - some older topics are being removed for several reasons. As they are deleted any posts attached will also be removed and therefore will decrease your total posts count. I am not removing anything that has been posted in the past year (so anything counting towards birthday bonus calculations will be maintained).
There are several reasons for removing old posts:-
- Many are harming our search engine scores due to things like old remote images (like on photo bucket etc), some smilies sites where the images have since been removed or expired. I can't easily find a way to bulk remove the images from existing posts. Whilst I have done this manually and found ways to remove a bunch of them in bulk - this is very time consuming and so sometimes, especially for large older contest topics (some from over 10 years ago) are being removed as some are of 30 pages with lots of remote images that are no longer available.
- Some are just way out of date and not relevant any more - some have links to sites that don't exist any more - so it makes sense to remove these. I have edited many of them - but again - it can be very time consuming.
- I started to remove some of the older birthday topics from many years because there is little point in keeping them for more than a year or few.
- Some jokes and links to jokes and videos that no longer work, some flash animations and animated gif jokes that are no longer accessible / have been removed from remote sites (a bit like the first reason).
I hope this makes sense.
Thanks,
Geno/CC