These are all archived somewhere, right?

Whoa, it seems they're not on the server anymore!!!   :'(
Any idea what happened Mark? Or am I looking wrong?
If they really got lost, the messages theirselves are still stored in old server backups. So, maybe they can be restored somehow (as an archive in a different place with just the messages from feb 2003 - june 2004 for example).

Didn't think people would mind, especially when people get angry when an old thread is resurrected with a bump.

It's not the presense of the old topic on a newer page that we don't like, it's the lack of the old topic on the older page that we don't like!  Or at least I think that's the case.

Edit: Btw is there any way to automatically lock all topics older than a certain age?

That was not a very good action Alex...
Yes, when someone bumps an old topic, we complain about various things. One of those things is that an old topic gets pulled out of its correct chronological place in history and thus leaving a gap there. Now, if you remove all posts from a year, you can't even talk about gaps, because there's just no history any more...

People can't go back to 2003 anymore and read what was going on at that time. It's cool to dig up some topics from the start of the MKDD competition for example, and read about the very early "perfect time predictions" topics etc. That's not possible now. Some of those old topics can also be used as a reference when newbies ask us old questions. Some topics also get used as links on the site, for example the 2003 kart tournament listed on this page.

Anyhow, apparently you just didn't think about these things when you deleted the posts.
I'm not sure if it's possible to re-inject the messages into the MB folder. The board index files would need to get rebuilt which is quite complicated. I'll try to find out if there's a way to do that.

To Fried: auto locking old topics wasn't possible on the old yabb board. don't know if it's possible on version 2.0. It would be a good solution to prevent the pointless topic bumping if that option becomes available.