Help talk:Archiving a talk page

Feedback: Archiving in the context of a page that uses level-one headings as dividers
Please see this discussion about a proposal to enable archiving of level-two discussions at a page (like WP:Help desk) that uses level-one headings to group atomic discussions by date. Mathglot (talk) 19:03, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

Unclear whether "lowest number" means 0 or 1
I.e. "where N is the lowest number for which no archive exists." under Manual archiving. Ybllaw (talk) 17:35, 4 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Normally archives will begin at 1, so /Archive 1, /Archive 2, etc. If there's no archives, you'll want to start at 1. Aidan9382 (talk) 18:05, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

When to archive a talk page
So I've recently been having this very strange interaction with, now ending with - it's a talk page that is over 30 KB long and has a thread from 10 years ago, but this user doesn't want to let me enable archiving that. Is this normal? Am I crazy? :D --Joy (talk) 19:39, 6 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Um, no, that's not what's happening. You want to archive all discussions except the most recent.  JayBeeEll wants to archive all discussions except the most recent five (which is the default).  Just leaving one does seem over-aggressive. Dan Bloch (talk) 20:48, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
 * So there's 15 threads there now. Leaving up to 5 will leave discussions from mid-2020 there, which is already 4 years ago. Are these actually relevant? What's the aggressive part? --Joy (talk) 12:22, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
 * 5 is pretty typical, even when there are years-old threads. It lets people easily see if what they came in to discuss has been discussed recently -- whatever that means for that talk page -- and whether new threads even typically receive any responses. I recently came into a talk with a concern about something and saw there'd been a discussion three years earlier, so I knew who to ping. I'll even manually archive newer discussions to prevent the archiving of older ones if the older ones seem more helpful. Valereee (talk) 13:33, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree with and .  Archiving has a benefit as the solution of a particular problem (the unnavigability of large talk-pages) but it also has costs (it makes it hard to see past discussions and the conclusions that they reached).  Fast (90 days on lightly-used pages) or aggressive (leaving only 0 or 1 threads) archiving settings increase the costs without providing any extra benefit. --JBL (talk) 18:37, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Guys, I'm sympathetic to these general arguments, but I feel like you didn't actually have a look at the context of this particular Talk:Jon Entine page... even once the bot archives the 10-year-old threads, and even if we let it archive the 4-year-old threads, it's still going to take 7 PageDowns to get to the discussion from March last year. That talk page already provides so much context that it's actually borderline unwelcoming. --Joy (talk) 08:54, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
 * No, I looked at it. I'd say the answer is set up typical archiving (generally I default to 90 days and 5 threads kept), then manually archive any threads you think are not worth keeping. Valereee (talk) 11:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Updates
Based on discussions at Template talk:Archives, I plan to update this page soon. Feel free to join in the conversation there or to offer any feedback on things that should be fixed. Regards, Rjjiii  (talk) 00:40, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Merging two different archiving styles?
The Amanita Muscaria Talk page has two archive methods—traditional numbered archives, and a CluBot III archive since 2020. Shouldn't these two be merged, and if so, how is this done? — al-Shimoni  (talk) 15:40, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, they should, and I've gone and done this. The page receives far too little traffic for date-based archives (they mostly only contained one section each), so I cut-and-pasted all the text from the newer archives into Talk:Amanita muscaria/Archive 3 (except for the October 2022 archive, which only contained an earlier version of the section in the June 2023 archive). I switched the archiving bot over to Lowercase sigmabot III because that's just easier at this point, but automated archiving probably won't be needed there again for a while yet. I also attended to a broken link anchor notice on that talk page and, as an admin, deleted the useless ClueBot indexing subpages. Graham87 (talk) 03:43, 24 June 2024 (UTC)