I was going through a bunch of posts and noticed that they were not being displayed.

It seems the forum filters shows a default for 2 months or newer. Is this a disservice to the forums? It gives the impression of less threads in area's like workshops which will only show 3 posts when there are 2 pages of questions concerning the workshops from the issues.

And what about older sketchbooks?

Similarly, it's as if a party was held  in a room for a long time, and while everyone was enjoying themselves, someone opened a door had all of a sudden there was this huge house that they could hang out in that noone knew about because they were only shown the first room when they arriaved.

Now imagine how silly everyone felt when they realised the door was there, clearly visible in front of them all along, and yet nobody bothered to open it.

The filter is easily changed using the "more options" button at the bottom of the page. Most forums tend to archive threads that are inactive for a period of time. They are still there just hidden. There's also a fully working search function up there at the top of the page that people don't bother using either

I absolutely agree that an archive feature should be use so that old posts don't come up and cause needed maintenance on the database, but seriously, 2 months(originally posted as weeks, pointed out via banja)?

 If the more options button wasn't clicked and all you saw were active posts from the past 2 months, as a lurker wouldn't you wonder why no one was posting? Would this lead to a false sense of no activity on this site?

The filter is 2 months not 2 weeks. If you look at the active threads page (click the "answered" link in the list on the right), there is about 32 pages of threads currently active in the past 2 months (i.e. not filtered out), with 20 threads per page that's about 640 currently active threads in a 2 month period that are visible. I don't really see that it looks like nothing is going on round here when I've seen forums with far less visible activity on show.

There's also a very visible drop down list at the top of that page allowing the filter to be changed, and the options button is also available to lurkers.

banjaxedmdt:

The filter is 2 months not 2 weeks. If you look at the active threads page (click the "answered" link in the list on the right), there is about 32 pages of threads currently active in the past 2 months (i.e. not filtered out), with 20 threads per page that's about 640 currently active threads in a 2 month period that are visible. I don't really see that it looks like nothing is going on round here when I've seen forums with far less visible activity on show.

There's also a very visible drop down list at the top of that page allowing the filter to be changed, and the options button is also available to lurkers.

Sorry, sorry, I meant 2 months. The original post for this thread said months and the post you were replying to meant months but said weeks. All I'm saying is that as a default the 2 months view may be very short for the actual activity going on here. If you don't log in and check the site via a browser you don't regularly use, some areas of the forums seem vacant.

 
The workshops area only shows 3 threads with the default filter on. Yes, you can turn off the filter, but the argument is that by default what is shown is too short a frame.