You keep doing it though, so how can we trust you'll stop when you are asked to? I personally can't so I can vouch for others not doing it too. I'm sorry, it's not a crime, but that doesn't mean dropping unfunny offensive comments and ridiculing others is any more tolerable.
Good for you
It's not slight and you know it well. You guys like to make issues disappear when it's convenient for you as if the community wasn't infested in the past with circlejerks and toxic people taking advantage of all the available stuff there was to bully, laugh and chastise others, and not just in the forums - but ingame, taking personal grudges into the roleplay even, or isolating people, and more.
It's not "a bit silly" just because you think it is so, this hyperfocus on the archive opening will serve for like 5 people to have a nostalgia trip and many others to get shit on people they don't like or similar stuff as it has happened in the past for years.
A "slight risk" doesn't even come near it.
The 'community' you speak of has largely moved on - we can sit here all day and act like the playerbase is the exact same as it were six years ago, but for each person back then that STILL plays, there's upwards of 4-6 that moved on - either from gaming outright (it's been long enough for them to grow into adults, don't forget) or to brighter pastures+different servers+different games. I mean, how many people dump hundreds of thousands of hours into Arma 3 instead, after having moved from RP here to there? Lots, and there's always lots of games to do stuff in.
Another thing I'd like to touch on is why
you are the one to be here talking about why we
shouldn't have it - yes, you were around all those years ago, much like us - but you simply don't even engage with the community as much anymore apart from threads like this on the forums. I can't recall seeing you whatsoever this iteration apart from maybe C24? Linntrix's iteration the same, and I don't really know if you're playing GTARP or not.
The defense of it being 'well, people are going to put time into unveiling cringy stuff' is just tiresome. I invite people to spend hours upon hours of their rapidly-minimizing free time to dig around for ridiculous stuff I did back then, because I don't care. I'm willing to bet vast portions of the community do - to deny them that right because a select few don't want their things exposed, I can understand and empathize with, but it's also still hundreds of hours of work put into logos, setpieces, events, writing, applications etc. that people
want to see. They WANT to see the past, they want to gleam new ideas from old, they want to realize how much they've grown, changed, how they've improved - and most importantly, how they can
still improve. I would love to go back and see if I still make common mistakes I made back then that have fallen to the wayside so I can set down on unlearning them before I continue my writing journeys.
Letting the work of the past fall because of the worrisome nature that a bit of bad might come from it is just throwing away so much for so little.
