Help talk:Archiving (plain and simple)

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question

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@Qwerfjkl, another user is coming along behind me adding something that turns the archives I've just set up red, and then I guess a bot is supposed to come along again later and turn them blue again, and it's because Cluebot doesn't allow blank parameters? This is an experienced and I'm sure well-intentioned editor, but I don't understand what it's about and whether the template on the help page needs changed? —valereee (talk) 15:13, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Valereee, the only changes I can see are removed whitespace, which @Sawol has already added to the template, and the use of
|archivebox=yes |box-advert=yes instead of {{archives}}. The template on the help page probably won't be changed, but I have no objection to not using {{Archives}}. ― Qwerfjkltalk 16:37, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We both know I have no idea what is going on. :) Whatever it is, I just want to make sure I'm not inadvertently causing someone else to have to do extra work. :D —valereee (talk) 16:48, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I revised your ClueBot misuses at Talk:2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism, Talk:Incunable, Talk:Kofta, Talk:List of gestures, Talk:Pimiento, Talk:Ppcocaine, Talk:Vegaphobia. Misuses are blanks between = and Talk:~. Blank parameters generated Talk:2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism/Archives/ 1, Talk:Kofta/Archives/ 1, .... Be careful not to type inserted blanks, and misspelled underscores, etc. of the parameter while using ClueBot. And I recommend that auto archiving be used if its talk page's size is more than about 80K bytes. Sawol (talk) 03:15, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'm putting the instructions back to using the previous templates while this gets worked out, as I have no idea what the problem is or how to fix it. —valereee (talk) 16:03, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You can use {{subst:Setup cluebot archiving|archives=yes}}. I fixed Template:Setup cluebot archiving. Refer to its revision history. Sawol (talk) 16:14, 1 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That was fast lol! Thanks! —valereee (talk) 11:42, 2 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion

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I think that the template on this page should be setup auto archiving instead of setup cluebot archiving. I tried cluebot and made a complete meal of it. When I switched over to lowercase bot, everything changed. I think this page should have the lowercase sigma bot template instead with archives = yes it is so much easier for newer users like me to use. Thanks Blanchey (talk) 10:34, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Blanchey, See the comment above, the main archiving page says lowercase sigmabot III won't archive sections that don't have a signature. I've seen that multiple times, sections ten+ years old that have never been archived because the section wasn't signed, so there's always a section or two on top of the page that are from newbs, often from cranks. And no one at the talk even realizes how old they are, because they weren't signed. That seems like a huge downside. The only listed downside for cluebot is it can take several days to do the first archive, which doesn't seem like an issue, and that it doesn't work for pages that are linked to by thousands of other pages, which isn't an issue for probably all but a very few pages. I think we should stay with cluebot as the default— Qwerfjkltalk 10:51, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe we could add both templates so people get a choice? I know this page is meant to be simple but people should be able to choose their bot as I didn’t get that option. I had to find it myself. @Qwerfjkl Blanchey (talk) 10:55, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Blanchey, What exactly was the problem you had? It looks fine when you added it here. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:01, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Qwerfjkl It took forever to get started and I will admit I’m not the most patient person in the world, another editor told me I had coded it incorrectly (I don’t exactly know what I did wrong although they are a good experienced user so they probably knew) hence why I changed it to lowercase bot. Blanchey (talk) 11:03, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Meena, can you explain what was wrong with the template? The wikimarkup was
{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis
| age                 =168
| archiveprefix       =User talk:Blanchey/Archive
| numberstart         =1
| maxarchsize         =75000
| header              ={{Automatic archive navigator}}
| minkeepthreads      =1
| format              = %%i
}}{{Archives}}
— Qwerfjkltalk 11:16, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Blanchey, the entire point of this page is to give people a very short copy/paste to use that in 99.999% of cases will work. The main Help:Archiving a talk page how-to is where we point people who want more choices. The fact you even knew there was somewhere else to go looking and were willing to do so instead of just shrugging and moving on without adding an archive means you may not necessarily need this page. :) Valereee (talk) 17:22, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Valereee That’s true, but I don’t think clue bot is ideal. It also created two index pages which carried on coming up on my talk header, making it look scruffy. Sigma bot doesn’t do this. And then as I said, another editor identified a problem with the bots coding and therefore suggested I used theirs briefly and then I found my own settings. Blanchey (talk) 17:31, 31 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Immediate archiving vs. the unknown waiting period

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When editing a talk page to initiate bot archiving, I used the suggestion command for Cluebot several days ago (Talk:Propolis) and see today that nothing has happened. Is there a way to trigger archiving immediately within the first seconds/minutes of saving the talk page edit, say by specifying a period from the beginning of talk (maybe 10+ years) to within the last 3 years?

Why do we accept waiting days/weeks for a bot to find the command?

Following the welcome: Are you new here? Welcome! There is a simplified version of this page at Help: Archiving (plain and simple). This is later followed by After that, a bot will be along in a couple of days to start archiving. No, it doesn't, and why does the bot need an unknown "couple of days"?

Also, in the Example archive search box on the welcome page for simple Cluebot archiving, the archives box shows it's Lowercase sigmabot that did the work, not Cluebot which supposedly was the choice for setup - this could be confusing to editors. Thanks. Zefr (talk) 19:22, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Zefr, this is because of the recent change to the archive box template to automatically detect archiving parameters. — Qwerfjkltalk 07:08, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Zefr and Qwerfjkl: I believe it will auto-detect the bot on the page it is used on or pointed at. I think this fixes the documentation: point to Talk:Macedonia which used Cluebot set to 90 days Rjjiii (talk) 07:55, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Rjjiii and Qwerfjkl: 1) is it possible to set the Cluebot template to begin immediately upon inserting the template and saving the page? If not, it seems better to just archive old topics manually or use a one-click archive tool one by one to get the job done.
Note that on the Cluebot commons talk page is the message: The current status of ClueBot III is: Not running - last edit was User talk:Ganesha811 30166s ago. Perhaps because Lowercase sigmabot has higher use statistics, its minor problems should be repaired and its preferred use should be implemented.
2) in the template format subst:Setup cluebot archiving|archives=yes, is it possible to insert parameters to archive old topics in a year range, such as "archive 2005 to 2021 topics, and leave the rest"? Zefr (talk) 14:18, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding the original question, I'm not sure. I've posted to User talk:ClueBot Commons.[1] Hopefully someone who has worked on the bot can offer more informed input. Rjjiii (talk) 05:35, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Zefr: "Is there a way to trigger archiving immediately within the first seconds/minutes of saving the talk page edit" > Yes, but no... CB3 basically does a rotation for every page that has its template attached to it. So it will never be 'immediate'... however, it should have by now, I'll check it hasn't died again - RichT|C|E-Mail 07:11, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Which bot to list

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Followup to this - I tried adding the auto setup script for lowercase sigmabot III since it's much more widely used nowadays, but I didn't want to unilaterally remove the other one.

But I hear @Rjjiii on the point of we should maybe only list one here to make this page as fool-proof as possible. In which case I'd say replace the current cluebot script with the lowercase sigmabot script instead.

This also helps with WP:1CA since that uses the sigmabot config due to its much wider use nowadays per Help:Archiving a talk page#Choosing a bot.

Anyone opposed? Raladic (talk) 03:09, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for opening a thread; I probably should have done so after reverting. I have no opinion on which bot is presented on this page, but think that it should just be a single bot. If it's switched over to lowercase sigmabot III, the {{archives}} example should also be switched to show an example with that bot by changing "|root=" to an appropriate talk page, Rjjiii (talk) 03:31, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yup. I'll wait a bit for others to chime in in case anyone has a compelling case against. Otherwise I'll switch it over in a few days or so and update the archives example as you said :) Raladic (talk) 04:02, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Since it's been almost two weeks and no further comments were made, I updated the page to use lowercase sigmabot III's script now. Raladic (talk) 19:08, 9 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Raladic, for what it's worth, Cluebot was used per Help talk:Archiving (plain and simple)#c-Valereee-2021-08-15T22:35:00.000Z-Qwerfjkl-2021-08-15T22:26:00.000Z. I agree it should be just one bot. I don't think 1CA is a concern for the beginners who would be using this page. — Qwerfjkltalk 14:53, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That’s not a great reason to use the bot as default for people who have no idea what they’re doing.
I do sometimes encounter such pages with missing section headers or signature, but we have simple templates to fix that now, e.g. {{unsigned}}.
Typically a talk page that has very little traffic isn’t one that a user yhat is otherwise unfamiliar with the finer details of archiving goes and adds archiving to using this guide page, unless they know what they are doing and will fix those sections as well. Raladic (talk) 16:32, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Raladic, so what kinds of pages would editors use this on? I don't think people using a simple guide will necessarily be familiar with {{subst:unsigned}}. I would imagine their own talk pages would be primarily what this page was used for. (Looks like {{subst:setup cluebot archiving}} has about a fifth of the uses in the user talk namespace, though.) — Qwerfjkltalk 21:02, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Anywhere where a user feel like a talk page has overgrown, but don't know about the finer details of archiving. We'd want them to use the template that has lower risk for issues (while not super likely that a highly linked page doesn't have archiving already, it's possible and it could cause Cluebot to crawl to the halt).
Also the 1CA concern isn't about beginners using 1CA, it's about beginner users adding cluebot archiving to some page, which means any experienced users who are using 1CA and later get to the page can't use it to correctly archive threads to the latest counter (so they instead will bulk up "Archive 1"), because they depend on Miszabot config being present as it reads that due to the fact that Miszabot is used on about 80% of all pages with archiving (43k vs 12k).
There's also the fact that Cluebot takes several days before it starts archiving a page with newly setup archiving, vs LCIII which will do it within the next 24 hours cycle.
Users who don't know what they are doing and just want to add archiving to their own user talk page don't usually need to worry about comments being unsigned or unsectioned, it's really just an issue with older pages that had talk content prior to the unsigned bots existence, which will automatically sign comments for users if they forget it.
They also would not benefit from the "main" selling point of Cluebot, which is that it generates an Index page, which to be fair, in 2025 is a marginal "feature". People will use search nowadays.
The automatic link repair is also no longer a benefit, as archive link detection is now automatic and users get an automatic popup telling them which archive page a thread is on now if it's no longer on the main page and they landed there.
So, on that note, going to go update the Help:Archiving a talk page#Choosing a bot section to add the several factors I just mentioned.
I think there's actually almost a point where the community might want to have a discussion on whether having the two separate bots is still worthwhile or whether we should consolidate it.
A lot of the features that cluebot had over LCIII are no longer a big factor, but it's slow performance, as well as non-human-readable config (having to write {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis|archiveprefix=Help talk:Archiving (plain and simple)/Archive|format= %%i|age=2160}} instead of {{User:MiszaBot/config|algo= old(30d)|archive = User talk:Example/Archive %(counter)d}} make it less desirable over LCIII these days.
P.s.: there is currently a discussion at VPP on whether all these "simplified" essays should be nuked at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Directing new users to essays on the top of policy and guideline pages.
Also, the {{talk header}} is being updated to contain the archiving config details that are currently missing from it (see Template talk:Talk header#RfC: tooltip wording, minthreadstoarchive for context), which means it will make the {{archives}} boxes even more redundant (I usually nuke them on sight these days, especially if there's already a talk header on the page, since the archives box makes the first thread on a talk page very difficult to read due to the space it takes). Raladic (talk) 22:46, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Raladic, maybe time to dust off User:Trialpears/Archiving manifesto. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:56, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]