Batch-archiving sites

Every year we create over 1400 blogs on our multisite installation for incoming students. They are really only used freshman year, and we need a way to prune them.

What we’d like to do is archive them for a year, then delete them permanently if no one asks for them. But there doesn’t seem to be way to archive blogs other than one-at-a-time — not my first choice when faced with that many.

I could write a set of queries to run to flip the “archived” column in the database (is that all there is to it, though?), but I wonder if there’s a plugin or other tool that could be used through the dashboard.

It would also be nice to be able to filter or sort the site listing by archived/deleted/etc.