It does seem like Gems and Precious threads has an awful lot fewer posts in it than Treasure Chest used to.
I seem to remember Grinus posting something a while back about working to clear out the treasure chest. Maybe he can clarify the motivations for that and what happened to those threads?
From what I'm aware of, it was being padded not quite Treasure Chest worthy threads. So he cleaned it up and streamlined it...trimmed the fat, if you will.
As far as the locations of the other threads, I'm sure he'll chime in about that.
Kidd is quite correct.
The threads in the chest were moved back to where they originally came from. Hence nothing was lost and some of them made a lot more sense in the context of other threads around them at the time in their original location.
The chest was taken out onto the beach and ceremoniously burned while we sat around drinking watching the fire play across the evening sky.
It was playing havoc with people linking to threads, only for those threads to be moved into the chest, hence breaking the links (because of how people had linked them - there is a nice way).
Also there was a lot of bloat within the chest. This also made it a nightmare for users to find things in there around a certain subject. This was only going to get worse with time.
Hence Gems and precious threads was born. There is an explanation and a link to example posts at the top of the new subforum explaining how things are done.
The idea is to create a thread within Gems, based around a topic or a user (i.e. YOU) which then links to the related threads of note. An index of useful threads.
So, rather than just moving whole threads, without giving people a clue as to what part of it is relevant, you can link to the post within the thread(s) around a given subject.
Gems may seem to have fewer posts, however those posts are packed full of Gems