On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:10:39 -0700, mike wrote:

Thanks for all the replies. Not just me, then...!

I think there was a point in time where anybody posting with the magic
voodoo to stop GG from archiving their post would also have the nice
side-effect of nuking any replies to that post, which can cause some big
'holes' in the archive for long threads.

I'm not sure if that's still the policy, or if Google just ditch the
specific post that the user's asked them not to retain.