Help talk:Archiving a talk page

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)

Merge subpages?

This template currently uses several subpages:

1. Help:Archiving a talk page/Other procedures
2. Help:Archiving a talk page/Manual archiving
3. Help:Archiving a talk page/Naming

Would there be any objection to merging all of these onto a single subpage like:

Help:Archiving a talk page/Details

I think that would make the content easier to access, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 21:17, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

No problems here, as the creator of the first subpage as a result of this RFC. Graham87 (talk) 03:57, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Talk:J.G. Wentworth

Can someone merge the tiny archive pages at Special:Prefixindex/Talk:J.G. Wentworth/ together? This page is not active enough to need yearly archive pages, archiving just 2 or 3 threads per archived year of 1 or 2 posts on each thread, with many years of no threads whatsoever.

-- 65.92.246.77 (talk) 21:38, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Done. The user who set up this archiving system did so on many hundreds or thousands of pages in such a disruptive manner that I got them indefinitely topic-banned from doing so. Graham87 (talk) 02:56, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Talk:Predictive analytics

Can someone merge the tiny by year talk archives for this page Special:Prefixindex/Talk:Predictive analytics/ into regular serial archives? There's not much to archive in each year. and the last archive year is 2018. -- 65.92.246.77 (talk) 22:28, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm on it. Graham87 (talk) 03:49, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Done; same as previous section ... and I switched the archiving bot because it's easier. As I'm no longer an admin, I'll have to tag the remaining indexing pages with {{Db-g6}} rather than deleting them myself. Honestly I've encountered so many of these situations that I usually ignore them these days unless they're really egregious. The user I mentioned above is by no means the only person to use date-based archives incorrectly; they're just by far the most prolific. Graham87 (talk) 04:16, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

More explicit standards

Could there be standard settings mentioned on this page, and would it help?

I have been chewing through the list of longest talk pages[1]. My rules for myself:

• if the talk page is very active (you can spot them on the list), I leave the settings alone
• if talk page has more than five old threads, usually with no date attached, I archive those manually. Otherwise I change the settings so the bot will get to them
• if someone changes my changes back, I jot a note on their talk page advising them on what I usually do. It's hard to convince people not to blank talk pages or in one case to have an auto-archiving time of 5 years (!)

The settings I almost always copy and paste are:

{{User:MiszaBot/config
	|archiveheader = {{Talk archive}}
	|algo = old(365d)
	|maxarchivesize = 50K
	|minthreadsleft = 5
	|minthreadstoarchive = 1
	|counter = 
	|archive = Talk:ARTICLENAME/Archive %(counter)d
}}

However I do think 6 months is fine too, or 75k archive size, depending on how active the page is or how long the topics are. On one occasion there was a very long discussion (across several topics), taking up 150k and that had finished two years ago. I sent all the related topics to the same numbered archive manually. But that's rare.

But as I indicated about 1 in 50 of these talk pages will have someone making sure that the page is always blank, or very long, or some other odd behavior. I have looked for, but cannot find, any detailed guidelines saying what a normal talk page should look like and why. Wizmut (talk) 16:42, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

My recommendations and reasons would go something link this, although I'm pretty flexible:

Archive header : whatever is there is probably fine. There are perhaps a dozen names for this template, some are more explicit and some are more brief.

Algo : an archiving time of more than one year or less than three months is usually not necessary. The exception is if the talk page is currently or habitually very fast-moving. Highly controversial news stories may start out with a fast archiving time that is later relaxed.

Max archive size : 50k is on the low end and also appropriate for most pages, in which discussions are usually short. Too many topics on the same archive page can be hard to navigate. A size larger than 200k may be too much text, unless this is an archive containing multiple related topics created in a short time.

Min threads left : The default of 5 remaining threads is expected, although fewer may be desirable if the discussions tend to be long. Keeping some discussions on the talk page helps first-timers see what happens on a talk page. Talk pages should generally not be "blanked" if there is a normal amount of discussion on them (5-10 topics), even if the topics are unlikely to garner replies. But if one huge and old topic occupies a talk page for a long time, it may be appropriate to archive it manually.

Min threads to archive : The default of 1 is expected unless the talk page is moving very fast.

Counter : is managed by the bot and should only be incremented to cut off an archive page in special circumstances. Perhaps, before and after the article is renovated, if doing so would not create a tiny archive.

Archive name : should match the article name, and is usually corrected by a bot if there is any mistake. Wizmut (talk) 17:04, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, thanks for doing this. I'd personally go for 100K though and I think that's closer to the average these days, but your mileage may vary. When I'm setting up archiving, I usually copy and paste the template from Talk:King Arthur, where I set up automated archiving in July 2018, back when I was doing this sort of thing more often (see the relevant entry for that month in my personal Wikipedia timeline). The King Arthur talk page is relatively busy so I set the algo parameter there to 90 days, but for less active talk pages I usually set it to a year. Graham87 (talk) 03:45, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

@Wizmut: Thanks for taking a look into the bot stuff. Some thoughts:

• Regarding, "There are perhaps a dozen names for this template, some are more explicit and some are more brief." Agree that there's no preference for one over the other. If you go back a decade or so, many of the names were actually different templates with slightly different text and features, which not having been around back then seems very chaotic. The archive header templates that are different are for date-based archives.
• Regarding "I have looked for, but cannot find, any detailed guidelines saying what a normal talk page should look like and why." The only stuff I found was at WP:TALKSIZE, WP:OWNTALK, and WP:BLANKING.
• I checked to see if the editor who started adding code samples was still around. John of Reading is still active, but that was in 2012 so I don't know if this is still on their mind. Valereee started Help:Archiving (plain and simple), and Qwerfjkl started {{Setup cluebot archiving}}. And so they would might have some relevant brains to pick regarding archiving defaults.

Good luck! Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:36, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

I just copied {{subst:Setup auto archiving}}. My only comment would be that I feel smaller archives are generally better; massive ones are a huge pain on older/mobile devices, and there's no real reason not to keep them small apart from navigation (which is what the search bar is for after all). — Qwerfjkltalk 12:40, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, RJJ. Wizmut, I personally think this page is mostly for people who are interested in the technical side of setting up archives so they can set them up on pages that need some sort of unusual archiving. I've suggested before that this page be moved to Help:Archiving (technical) and that Help:Archiving (plain and simple) be moved here. Last time this was discussed others agreed, but there was concern expressed over making the move correctly, and I wasn't sure I understood any complexity, so it ended up archiving unactioned. @Graham87, was there something in particular you were concerned about that makes that move complex? Valereee (talk) 11:57, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Re: standards. Your rules for yourself seem reasonable to me. I personally like to see five threads, even if they're very old, because that gives me a quick idea of what's been discussed most recently. For instance, if I go to an article and something seems strangely missing, I'll check the talk to make sure it isn't being discussed or been discussed recently. If there's literally been no discussion of that strangely missing info in the five discussions on the page, which go back six years, I won't bother to check the archives. If the page is blank, I can't easily see that info and have to check the archives. Valereee (talk) 12:09, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

@Valereee: Re the possibility of a page move: yes the archives and everything else would have to be moved correctly ... but I just thought of another possible snag: links that point here that might really be looking for the technical info. Maybe a proper requested moves process might iron that sort of thing out? Graham87 (talk) 12:35, 30 December 2024 (UTC)