In reply to Samuel "Otto" Wood.

That's a good start, but it's not enough I think. To users and developers it still looks like a single repository.

I have a couple plugins I use that are flagged this way and it never occurred to me that they weren't "in" the plugin repository. I never even noticed that you couldn't search for them.

Separating them even farther visually would help getting people thinking the right way about them. Perhaps a separate "Archived Plugins" menu item on wordpress.org, have a landing page in the main repository for archived plugins that "redirected" you to the archive repository and maybe force a manual download/install process in the archive repo.

Any way, just some thoughts.