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Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6: 6 months

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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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Merge subpages?

This template currently uses several subpages:

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]