While using archives heavily, I've noticed a few problems with how they're handling URLs: 1. Most (all?) of them are slash-fragile. If you remove the trailing slash from otherwise valid URL, you get 404. 2. They're not correctly hierarchical. If you remove the month from 'threads' URL, you get 404. It's like having subdirectories of directory that doesn't exist. 3. Empty months cause irritating redirect that causes URL to be rewritten. This is especially unhelpful when scanning archives month by month.
Ok, I've fixed the most irritating issues. That is: 1. I've added slash/no-slash 301 redirects to canonical URLs, 2. I've added /threads and /messages redirect to month index, 3. I've removed the silly redirects for empty months, and instead I either fall back to message list in threaded view, or display a meaningful message with empty message list.
