Clarification: I do not mean archived as taken offline. I an using the term from discourse interface. Automating the year (or some time increment) closing (archiving) of all topics. This is probably not what you are after.
Basically automate archiving topic on a calendar time basis. Right now you can on a category basis archive topics after some period of time. In my case there is a yearly window where all the topics from before a point in time should be automatically archived.