Unrelated to your question but an answer to your archive post: archives happen when they need to. If your back office is set up to archive monthly then each month will generate a new link to the previous month (as well as all prior months). See http://wonderwinds.com/ and scroll down the side bar a bit, but don't follow the 'more' link because I just noticed it's broken. The only thing required to make archiving happen is time has to pass.

No: there is no decade-by-decade archive mode ;)

I think date settings are determined by the database server you're using. For example, if you're using mysql then you could check the mysql documentation on a way to add an extra zero to the year formatting, then you could edit the b2e database to reflect that change.

I could be way off, though.

Well I would like to help develop and support this feature. whether it is b2evo or db specific. can anyone here shed some more light on what would need to be done? I don't have much time to check it out myself recently but I do plan to get this feature supported one way or another.

Ive found a few hooks in the skin and even the backoffice locale panel.. but yea, the same it archives into years, etc. seems to be a DB thing...