A few thousand per month doesn’t sound like too much, to me. We do see sites currently using chat at a rate of 10-30K messages per week. Can you share your numbers with a bit more precision?
I’m not sure what limitations we currently have in place by design. I’ll look into getting some answers about that. The archive feature isn’t heavily used to my knowledge. It could be that you’re hitting some limitations we’re not yet aware of. Many other sites treat chat as more ephemeral, and use “quote to topic” more sparingly to intentionally capture specific conversations in chat they care about, rather than archiving everything.
Perhaps archiving your chat more frequently would help?
I think my ideal here would be to have an option to have a running (daily) archive without having to close the channel. The retention period could then be configured so that messages for a given day are periodically captured in a topic, and then later deleted by the retention settings.
I think doing something like this is something we may do eventually, but it’s not something we’ve discussed in depth as a team.
Happy to discuss it more here, but it isn’t on our near term roadmap at this time.