Preserving Post Counts

[jnghh]

I tried searching for "post counts" on this forum to get what I want, but I can't seem to find anything: is there a way to maintain post counts even after deleting threads/posts?

I'm planning to clean up my forums a little bit by removing some old, old threads, but many of my members have worked hard to get up their post counts to a certain number (and status), and would be quite upset to have their numbers go down suddenly. 

[KGIII]

You can move them to a hidden section and enable recycling of deleted topics. The post count will remain the same that way and the recycled board is really handy for when you want to restore something that was accidentally deleted.

[jnghh]

Ahh, I considered that, but the whole point of my pruning my forums was because the message tables have gotten so big, I can no longer backup through phpmyadmin without the page timing out.

Unless there's some mod/function/method for easy incremental backups? (I had to manually do incremental backups recently, and at the end of the day, I was literally brain-dead.  )

[KGIII]

Perhaps cron or the backup within cPanel (if you have that) will suit. I'll take a look around and see what I come up with.