Environmental impact of Servers

[Dinoteeth]

MNHQ why don't you delete old threads after a period of time. Nobody is really interested in stuff that's 10 years old. The problem they had at the time is long gone.

All that data and old threads must be taking up a huge amount of space on servers and the environmental impact of keeping them running energy wasted and the energy needed to keep them cool.

It's a text-based website. The resources it consumes are fairly negligible, compared to websites like YouTube or Netflix. Besides, the historical data on here is useful.

Might be a lot less than YouTube or Netflix but it's still a huge amount of data that really isn't needed.

Old threads help ranking with Google.

Thus it helps to generate revenue for MN to keep old threads.

In terms of the use of energy to sustain that, I found that an interesting question. I asked husband who works in the industry and his feeling was that since it was text based, the storage would be minimal and if they were self hosted wouldn't make any difference what so ever.

Its an interesting question so thanks for bringing it up. I think its worth pondering, especially for video or music heavy sites.

There are photos as well as text in more recent threads, although of appalling quality so presumably cheap to store. Would be interesting to know what the total size of MN's data actually is, but it certainly won't be huge. There would be user benefits in moving older threads to less available storage, though - the longer retrieval time might discourage the frequent and highly annoying problem of zombie thread revival. I probably would suggest MN archive old photos after a certain number of years, though.

Hello @Dinoteeth thanks for your question. It's not one we recall being asked before so please bear with us while we look into this!

There are many older threads on the site that still hold valuable information for users though - especially if they arrive here from a Google search.