I can't find a lot of the older PMs I've received. The list doesn't go back more than one page. Where are the rest?
Sad to say, they're gone.
I had a problem a couple months ago with CathInfo taking too much CPU processing power. My webhost shut me down for a while! We can't have that.
So I had to find ways to lessen the load on the Database Server where everything lives. I didn't want to delete ANY posts, but I noted that the PM system creates a page with ALL PMs you have ever received. I couldn't believe how many hundreds of PMs I had collected over the years! So that's got to be taking a bit of CPU power to produce.
So I removed all PMs older than 2 months old.
If you have mementos or PMs that are dear to your heart -- maybe important news, an intriguing discussion, some awesome links somebody sent you, the PM you sent to your then-girlfriend proposing marriage, etc. -- you might want to save them off to a text file.
I can't archive them here, due to the nature of how the system handles PMs.
My thinking is that PMs are a lot like e-mails -- irrelevant a week or two later. Just like some e-mails need to be saved off to a permanent file, the same goes for PMs.