I have news that is going to cause wailing and gnashing of teeth and
gathering of pitchforks and all that jazz. Because bearing bad news is
what I do best.

Currently, there are upwards of two million messages sitting around
across characters. This is a lot of messages. A lot of messages means
some things go slowly when querying our database, slowing down both us
other IRE games, sometimes noticably. This will not be a panacea for
lag, but it's a step towards alleviating that issue.

As such, we'll be adopting a solution that's been implemented
successfully previously in other games: messages will be automatically
purged after a given time has elapsed since their creation, with a few
exceptions: there will be a way to preserve a limited number of messages
per character, number TBD. Messages from administrative characters will
also be exempt from the purges.

I don't have any of the details nor and ETA worked out for this yet, but
I want to make sure everyone has enough heads up so that they can go
ahead and archive any messages they want themselves. The message
preservation ability, however, will be released well ahead of the
introduction of the purges.

Penned by My hand on the 22nd of Urlachmar, in the year 441 CE.