Help talk:Archiving a talk page

How long before the bot kicks in?

From here, I pasted this:

{{subst:Setup cluebot archiving|archives=yes}}

at Talk:Derek_Williams_(musician) over the weekend, below all the curly bracket info at the top of the page, and according to the article above, the archiving should have kicked in within a couple of days. The bot has worked elswhere I have used it. Any suggestions as to why this is not working? Chrisdevelop (talk) 14:01, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the parameters of the {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis}} template it created, it has |minkeepthreads = 5 - this means the bot will always leave at least 5 threads (header level 2 sections) on the page before it attempts to archive any, and Talk:Derek Williams (musician) is currently sitting at just 3, so the bot won't attempt to archive any threads right now. Aidan9382 _(talk) 14:25, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! As the threads are very long and very old, I have reduced to 3 to see if that cleans up the talk bloat. Chrisdevelop (talk) 15:31, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

That won't help because there are only three threads on that page. The threads aren't *that* long or old compared to many threads on other Wikipedia talk pages; I wouldn't have set up archiving on that page, to be honest. Graham87 (talk) 03:15, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Feedback requested: use of 'archiveN' as subpage name for active, non-archival page

The Wikipedia:Featured articles process appears to regularly use pagenames of the form Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/<Article name>/archiveN for active, ongoing discussion. I raised a discussion about this, and your feedback would be welcome at WT:Featured article candidates#Use of 'archiveN' as subpage name for active, non-archival page. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 18:52, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

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 JayBeeEll, now ending with [1] - 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 Danbloch and Valereee. 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)