User:The Halo/How to Archive

When a talk page becomes too long, it will need to be archived. This is because long talk pages are often difficult to navigate, and also because some users may not be able to edit pages longer than 32kb.

How to Archive a Talk Page?
There are two main methods to archiving pages, manual, and automated.

Manual Archiving
When a talk page needs archiving, begin by clicking edit this page. After the edit box has appeared, select all of the text which you wish to be archived. Now right-click (for Window or Linux), or control-click (for Mac), and select the Cut option. The selected text will have been removed from the talk page, and copied to you clipboard, ready to be transferred to your archive.

You now need to create a page for your text to be archived to. There are two ways of doing this. Firstly, you can add a link to your archive page on the current talk page (i.e. Tutorial Archive 1). This will bring up a red link, which you will then click on to create your archive. Similarly, you may type, Tutorial Archive 1 into the search bar, and you will find the same red link from which you can create your archive. Create your archive by clicking create an article with this title.

You can now Right-click/control click, and select the Paste option, which will paste the old discussions which you have copied onto your clipboard into the edit box. Before saving your archive, you should add a note at the top of the page to tell users that the following discussions are inactive, and should not be edited. Once you have done that, click the Save page button, and then you have created an archive.

Automated Archiving
Werdnabot can currently perform this type of archival on any discussion page that has "talk" in the namespace. Any sections older than a certain age in days are cut-and-pasted to a specified subpage. A detailed tutorial on setting this up on a discussion page can be found here. The main difference between these two methods, however, is that Automated archiving copies the talk page history into the archive page, while using the manual archiving method doesn't.

Remember, try not to mix between both methods of archiving, as this can become confusing for users searching through the archives.