Yep, the number of posts on some areas in the forum are 1/8th of what they used to be. That's because I've pushed all posts that are over a year old into the forum archive. After four and a half years, the forum needed a bit of speeding up (although I can't tell any difference after doing this [xx(])
You can still search messages that are in the archive, and the archives are easily accessed from the archive icon. You can't reply to posts in there though, but that's probably a good thing.
Where is this archive icon you speak of?
Ok, so it's visable from the category view, but is that it?