i just had an email conversation w/ 37signals support which yielded nothing helpful, so i figured i’d describe my situation here for posterity.

having gone through a number of projects, our campfire lobby is starting to fill up… too many rooms are listed and empty because many projects have been completed. there’s no way to “archive” or “deactivate” a room to remove all of the noise. i know it’s possible to delete the room, but then we’d lose all of the content in the room. that would be bad since which we need to search older rooms to refer to past discussions… the whole reason for using campfire in the first place! is there any official word on the ability to “archive” rooms?

following that train of thought… if i could export the content, then deleting a room would be somewhat acceptable. however, there doesn’t appear to be a way (official or unofficial) to export the entire room’s transcript as a single file. i see that we can view each day’s transcripts, but there are hundreds of days worth of transcripts for each project. any ideas as to how us programmatically export that data (discussions and files)?

anyway…

the issue that we’re struggling with is the ability to deal with large numbers of rooms (>20), showing only the “active” rooms, and retaining the content of “inactive” rooms in campfire. the simplest feature enhancement i can imagine is just the ability to re-order the rooms, which would mitigate the issue of too many [inactive] rooms, placing the most important ones up at the top. any word on something like this?

so the question remains: how do people who have lots of rooms handle this? just suck it up and deal?

Hi Justin-

If you delete a Campfire room its transcripts will remain available in the Files & Transcripts tab.

sam, thanks for your response.

hmph… that behavior sounds nearly exactly like what we need. i feel kinda silly, as i wrongly assumed how Campfire worked—sorry about that! (heh!) i never actually tried to delete the room, because it didn’t seem like deleting it would do what i wanted it to do (retaining the transcripts/files, i mean).

having said that and after actually deleting a room or two, it appears that the transcripts of the room do remain in the “file and transcripts” tab as you said. however, they only occur in the paginated transcript listing. in other words, searching does not return results for the deleted rooms and the SELECT menu for rooms does not include the deleted rooms. as i mentioned in my initial post, searching archived rooms is a primary method that we use to mine our campfire content.