Template talk:Talk header

| minthreadstoarchive

This parameter is still not discussed by the popup message explaining why/why not a page gets archived.

If | minthreadstoarchive = 2 for instance, then an editor needs to read the actual code (=editing the page) to understand why the archive bot isn't running. (It is because even though a section is clearly ripe for archiving, there is only one section to archive, and the parameter tells the bot to hold off archiving until it can archive 2 or more sections in a single go).

Either we agree the bot's behavior should be explained by what we tell talk page readers, or we agree this isn't necessary.

In the first case, the info that the bot won't act until more talk sections have expired needs to be added somehow. In the second, why not simply remove all info related to the bot's parameters? CapnZapp (talk) 14:27, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

@CapnZapp, we could try adding it to the tooltip somehow. But I'm also not losing sleep at night over it just not being displayed, and I'd oppose any sort of display more prominent than inclusion in the tooltip. Sdkb ^talk 14:54, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

@CapnZapp and Sdkb: I think it is a good idea if done within the tooltip. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:29, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Weird redlinked tracking category

Within the past few days, this template has started throwing up a redlinked Category:Pages using Talk header that I can't figure out how to fix.

This template is used on well over 750,000 pages, so it's clearly not a category we would actually need for tracking purposes — we have various more specialized categories, like Category:Pages using Talk header with unknown parameters, to track errors in its usage, but we would have no need whatsoever for a comprehensive category indiscriminately tracking all of its usages across the board. That's not what's actually happening, however: it isn't showing up across the board on all 750,000 usages of the template, it's showing up on isolated project pages that are invoking the template for discussion or testing purposes, such as Template:Talk header/testcases4 and Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2023 May 17.

But it also isn't being directly transcluded by the template itself — the template only adds the more specialized error-tracking categories, while including absolutely no code that would directly transclude an indiscriminate Category:Pages using Talk header, and it hasn't been edited since December 2024 to start adding any new categories that didn't already exist previously. So once again, it's clearly being smuggled in via a module.

When the report last updated on Thursday, it was only on the testcases page, which I resolved by wrapping the invocation that was causing it in {{suppress categories}} — but when I did my daily "have any of the last set of redlinks come back again" check today, it was back, this time on the TFD page. And while I could just wrap that one in the suppress wrapper too, the fact that it recurred more than once suggests that it might continue to recur if it isn't resolved at the source.

So could somebody figure out where it's coming from and make it go away? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:16, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

I can answer the where part of that - currently the category is being emitted only by the sandbox version of this template (see Special:Diff/1291362857). As to what the purpose of it is, not too sure. Aidan9382 _(talk) 14:27, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Template:Archives needs the archiving part of Talk header

{{Archives}}. See:

• Template talk:Archives#A narrower banner would help declutter the top of talk page.

We need someone with template skills to copy the archive banner part of {{talk header}} over to {{archives}}. And {{talk header}} uses Lua. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:41, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

The archive-banner part doesn't. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:11, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

Deduplication

After Timeshifter suggested making {{archives}}'s banner style more similar to the archives box in this template, I've been exploring the idea of replacing the archives box in the talk header here with {{archives}}'s banner style with some parameters. What do you think?

{{Archives/sandbox|root=Talk:France|banner=yes|tooltip=yes|image=none}} →

Note some differences:

1. The horizontal rule (bar) above the search box would be removed. Though I never got why that was there anyway; the search box is very closely related to the list of archives.
2. When the archives have been set up yet the first archive page has not been created, the full template will still show:

{{Archives/sandbox|root=User talk:Aaron Liu/sandbox|banner=yes|tooltip=yes|image=none}} →

Though I don't see any reason to at this time, I could make changes to eliminate these differences if there's consensus to. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:53, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

If there are no archives yet the whole section should be hidden. –jacobolus (t) 01:58, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Agreed, but the page links show, no matter what (if there're any). - FlightTime Phone (open channel) 02:05, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

So, when there's no archives yet, you want to show this?

{{Archives/sandbox|root=User talk:Aaron Liu/sandbox|banner=yes|tooltip=yes|image=none|search=no}} →

Or do you mean hide the archive part entirely, only showing the policy reminders and stuff above the archives section of Talk Header?

@Timeshifter recommended instead only displaying the archival configuration:

Aaron Liu (talk) 02:18, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

I would like a variation of this:

{{Archives/sandbox|root=User talk:Aaron Liu/sandbox|banner=yes|tooltip=yes|image=none|search=no}} →

Except I would substitute: "ClueBot III will archive sections when more than 4 are present" for the first part. I don't know how to make the banner, so I just put it in a table. Needs the tooltip too.

ClueBot III will archive sections when more than 4 are present.

Auto-archiving period: 3 months

--Timeshifter (talk) 03:48, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't see how that's superior to "just the configuration" (box with just "Sections older than..." and nothing else). Aaron Liu (talk) 11:36, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

That one takes up 2 lines on my 1080p monitor even at the same banner width as {{talk header}}. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:24, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

I've shortened the automatic summary so the ClueBot case for just the summary sentence is also just one line. Check out my sandbox: User:Aaron Liu/sandbox. Your suggestion also takes up two lines for sigmabot. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:30, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

If there are no archives yet, nothing needs to show at all. In practice people only add a bot to archive talk pages when they are getting long-ish and the bot is supposed to run at the earliest opportunity. We don't need any special marker for the short and trivial time window in between when the bot setup is added and the first time it runs. Thinking about this is a waste of time and effort; find something better to do. –jacobolus (t) 14:19, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

"Thinking about this is a waste of time and effort; find something better to do." Well then, stop thinking about it, and go elsewhere with your comments.

I, and many others, have added archiving bots to pages with few sections currently. On contentious articles for example. For example, to make sure the minimum thread settings aren't set to zero or one, as a means to stifle discussion. Also, 4 is the minimum for a table of contents to show up in Vector 2010.

It can be months to go from 4 threads to 5 threads. So letting people know there is an archiving bot already set up keeps people from wasting time looking in the wikitext. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:01, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

I would love to: this part of the template works fine as it currently is, and there are plenty of better things to do. Unfortunately, by proposing changes to one of the most widely used templates on the site, you are forcing other folks to think about it.

"I, and many others, have added archiving bots to pages with few sections currently."

Well one easy solution is to just stop doing that. Alternately, you can keep doing it, and not worry that readers who care about the archive settings need to read the page source. If there are only 4 threads on the talk page, then any choice to think about archive settings is some editor's own business – if they want to spend their time looking at the page source they can do so, or they could just not worry about it and move on with their day. There's no significant need to archive talk pages until they become unmanageably long (say, at least 10+ topics) or full of extremely stale discussion. If there are no archives, then showing anything at all related to archives is distracting and confusing to unfamiliar readers, while providing negligible benefit to anyone else. I am opposed to showing it. –jacobolus (t) 20:29, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

• I'll leave the discussion about what to display when there are no archives yet to others, although I think the general principle that we should only display information when it is relevant is a good one. I support removing the horizontal rule per Aaron Liu's reasoning and general graphical design best practice, and I likewise support overall consolidation of templates, so I hope this goes forward. Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 20:57, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

It could be an optional parameter to show something when there are no archives yet. That lets the page editors decide. I like Aaron Liu's latest version:

I think Sigmabot or Cluebot can be used as the link label. The full name can be used as the link under the label. That will keep it all shorter, and on one line in most cases. --Timeshifter (talk) 00:52, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I still prefer the last version mentioned #c-Aaron_Liu-20250620021800-FlightTime_Phone-20250620020500. It's simple and doesn't extend code to handle template parameters to a somewhat unwieldy level. After a change it's also no more longer than what Timeshifter prefers. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:57, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

As I realized elsewhere there is no need to right and left align the 2 halves of the banner showing just above when there are no archives. They can be joined. That might make the coding easier. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:18, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

The splitting is not the problem. The problem is having two versions of the summary of the archive configuration. Which I don't think even has a benefit as what you like more fits on the exact same number of lines after I shortened the automatic summary. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:04, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

OK. This is pretty short below. In a table since I don't know how to do a banner. Removed "automatically". Kept full bot names.

Lowercase sigmabot III will archive sections older than 30 days when more than 4 are present.

Cluebot III will archive sections older than 30 days when more than 4 are present.

--Timeshifter (talk) 02:25, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Yeah that sounds good. (I still think "may" is better to prevent people asking when a message will be archived since ClueBot has inconsistent scheduling. It's also slightly shorter.) Aaron Liu (talk) 02:42, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

How long can Cluebot take to archive a page once the necessary number of sections has been reached? Maybe a tooltip can be put on the word "will" saying "depending on bot scheduling". Another problem is if there is a minimum number of threads to archive at a time. That could go in a tooltip on the words "older than 30 days". Maybe "minimum of 2 sections older". That option should be removed from the bots in my opinion. It can be very confusing to editors. It is "minthreadstoarchive" in Sigmabot. "minarchthreads" in Cluebot. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:02, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

ClueBot does things a bit irregularly. I think it's best to just say "may" plus, for example, the bot could be temporarily down. I also don't think much people need to have minarchthreads displayed in no small part because nobody has ever asked for it to be displayed. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:22, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

There is no need to surface this information to readers (and if you are confused about it, you can put your worry away and ignore the distinction). The point of having a minimum number of threads to archive is to prioritize human discussion over distracting and not-at-all-urgent bot edits. This configuration option helps the bot better serve the needs of a variety of different types of talk pages with different levels of activity. If a bot takes an extra day, week, month, or 3 years to archive a particular discussion, it causes no harm. Whether a discussion page shows 4, 6, or 10 prior topics and whether some of them are 6 months, a year, or 3 years old is not really relevant to participating on that page. These features only become relevant if the page is becoming bogged down or people keep getting distracted replying to no-longer-relevant discussions.

The parts readers care about, with respect to archiving, are: (1) the discussion page should not get overwhelmingly big so that it's necessary to skim past many hundreds of kilobytes of talk history to get to active conversations; (2) the discussion page should not gratuitously keep around very old discussions about past versions of the page that are no longer relevant after significant intermediate editing – it's rarely if ever useful to have someone reply to 10+ year old topics, most of whose participants are long gone; and (3) the archives of old discussions should be easy to locate, and ideally searchable. Everything having to do with bots and their configuration is a distant last place, only of interest to a tiny group of readers. –jacobolus (t) 03:34, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

There is also no good reason to publish the bot's name to ordinary readers, for whom it is irrelevant. Having the bot name in the "Auto-archiving period" mouse-over text when there are archives available is already more than sufficient.

Adding additional "optional parameter" seems like a bad idea. It's self-indulgent to throw additional distractions into regular readers' faces that is only relevant to a trivially tiny subset of editors who care about bot config settings but can't be bothered to read the page source.

–jacobolus (t) 03:12, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

The entire thing is for people who care about archiving, not regular readers. I don't see any optional parameters added here. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:20, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Quite the contrary. This is an extremely widely used template. Every bit of it needs to be extremely important to justify showing up in the faces of readers. Editors working on this template must hold regular readers' interests firmly above their own or other "power users'" interests. The template API must also be kept as simple as possible, since it is very widely deployed and we shouldn't be forcing large numbers of editors to go consult the documentation unless it's necessary.

The fundamental purpose of this section of the template is to show an archive search box; when there are no archives that purpose is nullified and the section should be hidden. Additional doodads about bot configuration are essentially distractions from the primary purpose, and to the extent they are shown at all they must be made as unobtrusive as possible. It's okay to use otherwise unusable space next to the archive wikilink list to show a very brief summary with more information in a mouseover, because in that context readers will already see that there are archives and it's not too confusing what "Auto-archiving period: 1 year" (or whatever) means. But when there are no archives, and the metadata doodads are the only thing left, they aren't important enough to justify themselves. –jacobolus (t) 03:21, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

You have a low opinion of readers' ability to understand something as simple as this: "Cluebot III will archive sections older than 30 days when more than 4 are present." --Timeshifter (talk) 03:30, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

No, I just have high standards and care a lot about respecting the needs of ordinary readers instead of self indulgently making every part of the site as unwelcoming as possible. –jacobolus (t) 03:31, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I'm saying the entire thing we're discussing about showing just the config information when there's no archives yet is mainly for people who care about archiving. I found it weird that you singled the bot's name out.

It's also good to have some indication the template will show the archives listing. The archives box on pages without a talk page header is one of the ways to help verify that your bot config will work correctly, as the config summary won't show up if e.g. you set an invalid archival duration. And you don't know whether logged-out editors—our most prolific content contributors by word count—will be surprised when their discussions suddenly disappear after a day.

Also, the parameter to disable the search box exists for a reason. More than enough people find this area useful for purposes besides searching the archives. If you were correct that only the search box was what's important, you would not have anything besides the search box so as to simplify and "not confuse regular readers".

I don't see any reason this'll newly cause editors to consult the documentation. Again, this will not add any new parameters. The config summary is already in the tooltip and if anyone would be confused they already are. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:31, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Literally nobody's discussion is going to "disappear after a day" on a talk page that just now had archiving set up but hasn't yet had the bot run on it yet, unless the bot is outrageously misconfigured. cf. YAGNI. "not add any new parameters" – I was replying to "It could be an optional parameter to show something when there are no archives yet. That lets the page editors decide." –jacobolus (t) 03:37, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Sure, disappear after a week. The first time someone goes to a talk page they reads all applicable banners. A week later they wants to check on it, so during break time they mentally ignores the banners "they's read already" to discover that their discussion has mysteriously disappeared. This is curbed if not prevented by having an indication that automatic archiving is set up, and we use the rest of that "otherwise unusable" one-liner space to say a little bit of details. The population of editors who want to see whether archives are set up on a talk page is higher than you think.

And again, I don't see why you aren't arguing this for the list of archive subpages, the wikilink list.

I was replying to "It could be an optional parameter to show something when there are no archives yet. That lets the page editors decide.

That's a parallel discussion on improving {{archives}}, comments which Timeshifter decided to copy and paste here, not exactly sure why. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:42, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

"disappear after a week" – your fantasy scenario is still entirely implausible, and this change isn't going to have a meaningful effect.

Either way, someone could leave a comment on a (brand new and never archived but somehow extremely high traffic) talk page, have the same aggressive archiving set up either just before they left or while they were gone, and then come back a week later to find their post has been archived. In either case they weren't going to have been looking at the talk header box before they commented to figure out what the bot config was, and in either case after they come back there will already be archives (that's the entire premise here). With or without this change the person is going to be identically confused (or not) and presented with identical information on their return. –jacobolus (t) 03:49, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

your fantasy scenario is still entirely implausible

How? Archive durations are very commonly one-week, and there exists talk pages with so little activity that they haven't had archives yet. I didn't say it would need to be high traffic. My scenario is more common than yours, especially given that the editor doesn't guess that it was automatic archiving yet and thus is new and is more likely to read the talk header before their first comment. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:54, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

The situation you are imagining requires all of these to happen, in this order:

1. A brand new but very high traffic page has extremely (over)aggressive archiving set up by some zealous editor
2. A novice reader navigates to the page before the bot has a chance to ever run on it, and makes careful note of the bot config mentioned at the top of the page
3. The reader leaves a comment, now expecting their comment to disappear because they did a close analysis of the bot config
4. The reader goes away for a week, during which time there are 5+ more separate discussion topics added and the bot then archives the topic where the reader's comment was left
5. The reader comes back to the page and their comment is gone, but, because our change to the template saved the day, avoids confusion.

This seems extremely implausible to me, to the point were I doubt, in the situation where this change goes through, it will ever happen even a single time. #1, #2, #3, and #4 are each independently rare, and their combination is vanishingly unlikely. –jacobolus (t) 04:34, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: Page editors can put {{archives}} on a page that has an archive bot set up. And even before an archive has been created, the archive bot or banner shows up.

I am not wedded to the option to allow the same in {{talk header}}, but I believe many page editors would want that. I was just trying to give them that option. You apparently don't want to give them that option. Let's let other editors here weigh in. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:57, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I am indifferent about {{archives}}. It's used on fewer than a tenth as many pages as {{talk header}}, it's relatively out of the way in a narrow right-floating box, and I've never seen it used when there weren't already archives. Feel free to advocate hiding this one when there aren't yet any archives. –jacobolus (t) 05:22, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Jacobolus

1. Again, "high-traffic" is your invention. (Or maybe you confused this with Timeshifter saying it's also helpful to stop people from wasting time adding an archive config when it's already added on new high-traffic pages, which is a different scenario with different effects.) In fact, I specified that this scenario is more likely on chill-traffic pages. I do not find seven days overaggressive.
2. I do not see the first part being uncommon on chill pages. And if you're assuming that readers won't read the banner, then nothing we decide about any parts of the talk header has any point.
3. You do not need to do a "close analysis" of the bot config. It says in plain text that inactive discussions will be automatically archived in a week.
4. Where's the 5+ topics from? How does that influence anything? Who said anything about that? Without that part, I do not see any reason why this would be rare.

I do not see how having a single, clear line of text is unwelcoming or confusing.

And you still have not answered why your argument does not apply to the wikilink list as well. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:47, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

It would have to be a "high traffic" talk page in order to need very aggressive (weekly) archiving, and accumulate more than 4 new topics within a single week. And it needs to be a brand new page, because anything older with that much discussion would already have one or more archive pages. On a typical not-yet-archived (low-traffic) talk page, what would happen instead is that the person's post would stick around for at least many months if not years before being archived. "says in plain text" – a Wikipedia novice just leaving a rare discussion comment (or, frankly, anyone else) is unlikely to be very carefully perusing all of the banners on the page before leaving their comment, in case there might be aggressive archiving. Instead, they'll wait until the post is archived to wonder what happened, at which point this change will be moot.

I don't understand your question. This entire section (list or archive pages, bot config, search box) should be hidden if there are no archives. –jacobolus (t) 20:26, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

The same scenario can happen under other durations at least up to a month. And even for high-traffic situations, it's not uncommon for new articles (thus with new talk pages) to be popular, and then you can very conceivably have this happen.

and accumulate more than 4 new topics within a single week

I don't get why you're mentioning that either. The same scenario occurs even if the reader's discussion is the only new one in the past week.

very carefully perusing

Again, this information will be immediately understood if one reads it at all. The part of the talk header before the archives display is designed to offer novices basic information. It is pointless to argue that it shouldn't be there because novices won't read it because the bulk of this entire template is made on the presumption that novices will read it.

You said The fundamental purpose of this section of the template is to show an archive search box [...] Additional doodads about bot configuration are essentially distractions from the primary purpose, and to the extent they are shown at all they must be made as unobtrusive as possible. This makes the archive list also an additional doodad. You then say that such additional doodads can only be justified as they do not take up additional space. The archive list takes up additional space when there are archives. There are way more ways people use this template than you assume. You have not clarified why taking up one extra line creates a distraction either. It has no possibility of confusing anyone, or at least no more than the archive list. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:14, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Anyways, I can drop the discussion on whether to change existing behavior for now. Would you agree with replacing the standalone Archives reimplementation with a transclusion if it still just hides when there are no archives? I've rigged what this should look like up in {{Talk header/sandbox}}, and you can see it in effect at TM:Talk header/testcases. Aaron Liu (talk) 19:21, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

Reminder: minthreadstoarchive

|minthreadstoarchive= is a parameter used to configure archiving bots (cf User:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo), telling the bot to only engage when at least the specified number of discussion sections meet other criteria for archival. The reason you might want to set |minthreadstoarchive=2 or any other number > 1 is that for some talk pages, the cadence of new topic results in annoyingly frequent bot archive operations - each time a new topic is added, the bot might archive an old one. Of course, on most pages using frequency ("only archive every week") is more than adequate, and on other pages archive bot activity is a complete non-issue. But if a topic attracts attention, say, once every three months, and you set the archiving frequency also to three months, you still get a page history where every time a new topic is started, that is followed by a bot archiving action. |minthreadstoarchive= is meant as a solution to this issue. Set perhaps |minthreadstoarchive=3 to stop the bot from appearing to "obsessively clean out" the talk page.

But this is currently not explained to the user. |minthreadstoarchive= is currently ignored by the auto archive notice part of this template. To understand why the bot "isn't working", you need to edit the page and look at the actual bot config. The entire reason to have an auto archive notice section of this template is so the user can avoid this.

The ability to explain this to regular readers ("the reason the bot hasn't archived the page yet even though there is an eligible discussion section old enough and even though there are enough sections left afterward, is that the bot is told to not archive unless 3 or more sections can be archived in one go") did once function but is still not re-instituted after the major works done (where this archive automatically interprets the bot instructions, instead of the user having to duplicate the settings: once for the bot and once for the auto archive notice) on this and the {{Archives}} templates. When the auto archive notice functionality was merged into Talk header a promise was made to fully port all capabilities of the older code. There was never any consensus to drop this functionality. Please add it back. CapnZapp (talk) 09:41, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Let's have a specific concrete example. Talk:Kármán line's Talk header currently says Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III after 90 days of inactivity when more than 4 threads are present. in the tooltip if you hover over "Auto-archiving period". It should say something along the lines of Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III after 90 days of inactivity when more than 4 threads are present, but only when 2 or more discussions can be archived. (my emphasis). Cheers, CapnZapp (talk) 09:48, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

I agree. I remember being totally confused by a talk page not archiving a section. Looking at the bot code did not help. Because minthreadstoarchive was not listed at all.

I found out later it existed and that it defaulted to 2 threads minimum. —Timeshifter (talk) 15:16, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

At least for Lowercase sigmabot III, I heartily recommend everybody to set up the parameters as needed, and not rely on the code's defaults. I believe the defaults are seldom what you want. Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 17:14, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks CapnZapp for perusing the source code. I fixed the default listed for minthreadstoarchive at User:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo#Parameters explained. It now says 2. It mistakenly said 1 before. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:39, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Its not my thing to say, but I don't think a how to should be mistaken for technical documentation. In other words, those numbers were probably intended as suggested numbers, not the defaults of specific program code. Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 12:18, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

CapnZapp. Column said "Default". I noticed you started a discussion there. I will reply further at User talk:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:13, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

This is not something that ordinary readers need to care about at all. The more complicated you make the popup text the more likely it is to confuse someone. Anyone obsessively interested in bot config can easily look at the page source. –jacobolus (t) 16:35, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

It appears you want to start a discussion where some, but not all, pertinent information regarding the archive bot's activity should be presented to the user, user:jacobolus. That the archive bot notice section of this template should help the user avoid having to look at the page source only some of the time? Meanwhile, I didn't start this discussion to change or question consensus. I started this discussion to remind the powers that be that the work to implement the various changes and improvements to this and the Archives templates isn't complete. Have a nice day, CapnZapp (talk) 17:02, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

I want to urge people to consider the trade-off involved in every bit of additional information added to one of the most widely used user interfaces on Wikipedia, and aim for restraint and minimalism on such interfaces rather than trying to cram every possible thing in. Make sure a large audience really needs it before you add each extra thing that is likely to be distracting and unhelpful to the vast majority. –jacobolus (t) 19:22, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: Tooltips are pretty minimal. And readers don't have to hover over them. Those who bother to do so are obviously interested. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:03, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough. I personally find the proposed description ("Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III after 90 days of inactivity when more than 4 threads are present, but only when 2 or more discussions can be archived.") to be pretty confusing, and I already know what it's supposed to mean. I can only imagine what a new reader is going to think. I think the "obviously interested" should just look at the source markup, but if other editors all agree that we should cram more stuff in the tooltip, I'm not especially bothered – I will continue to ignore these. –jacobolus (t) 01:30, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: I gave an example higher up where I did look at the talk page source code for the archive bot settings, and it didn't help. Because minthreadstoarchive was not listed at all, and I had no clue at the time what I was looking for, or should look for. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:51, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

It looks like the issue there was that the docs were wrong. Good job fixing it; that should, already, prevent future problems like the one you encountered. Always archiving at least 2 threads seems like a good default (frankly the docs should urge people not to configure this lower than 2). –jacobolus (t) 02:37, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

@Jacobolus:. At the time of my confusion I knew little about the bot parameters. It was on a Village Pump. I asked on its talk page what was going on. I was not the only one confused. Finally, someone stepped in who knew something about these arcane settings. It shouldn't take a separate discussion for editors to figure this out. The expanded tooltip solves the problem. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:56, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

You are right, it shouldn't have needed a separate discussion: the docs should have been be accurate, so that anyone who is very curious about the bot behavior (apparently you were among the first and only people ever in this category) can can go look at the docs and see what the default setting is. Luckily you fixed the docs, which solves this problem. –jacobolus (t) 03:01, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: I am definitely not the first. And at the time I didn't have a clue where to look for more info. So fixing the doc does not fix the problem. And I was an experienced editor even then, but not in this area. Newer editors often know next to nothing about bots, and don't know that the bot code is right there in the talk page wikitext at the top. And even if they do, they haven't spent time learning the meaning of all the parameters. So the expanded tooltip is necessary to get a simpler explanation of the current settings. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:13, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

just to note: my stake in this is chiefly to prevent functionality from being stealth deprecated without discussion. Had the merge into Talk Header been predicated on dropping support for this parameter, I would have opposed it. The fact the coders are silent is disappointing. Regards CapnZapp (talk) 12:23, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Support but with a simpler wording and not shown outside of the tooltip. That message is already a mess, and adding a final "but" clause makes it sound insane. A simple Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived in pairs by Lowercase... is good in this example. FaviFake (talk) 20:48, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Opposed for now – I tend to agree with jacobolus, here. I think there is a limit to what users can absorb, even in a tooltip expansion. Param |minthreadstoarchive= is one of the ones that is a bit arcane, and it is enough if it is described in the doc page. That said, I will watch this discussion (which I hope will attract more diversity of opinions), and stay open to changing my opinion about it. Mathglot (talk) 09:01, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Mathglot. It's a sentence. How hard can it be? It is not enough if it is described in the doc page, as I previously explained why. Here is more info: Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals)#Archive bot was missing some parts. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:13, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

Please note that this is not a request for new functionality. This is a reminder to add back what got dropped between chairs at some point of the substantial work on the archive bot notice, including its integration into Talk Header. Regards CapnZapp (talk) 12:26, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

CapnZapp. I agree. Consensus should have been reached to remove it. Currently, 3 people support returning it. 2 oppose. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:13, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

@Timeshifter Please remember WP:VIE and WP:PEPPER. Respectfully, FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

FaviFake. Please see WP:3LA and WP:Don't cite essays or proposals as if they were policy. I have responded to comments with new points in each of my comments. You have made only one substantive comment (the one where you supported CapnZapp's proposal). So you are violating the essay you promoted: WP:Polling is not a substitute for discussion. You are not discussing. I never said my poll was a substitute for discussion. Nor have I discouraged discussion. It seems that you are doing that. --Timeshifter (talk) 22:28, 5 August 2025 (UTC)

@Timeshifter You seem to have misinterpreted my comment. I'm not "violating" any essay, since they aren't policy. I pointed you to WP:VIE because you seemed to be incentivising closing this discussion based on votes rather than consensus.

Besides, kindly keep the ad hominems to yourself. FaviFake (talk) 14:51, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

You are repeating yourself. Please see my previous replies. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:15, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

It is not exactly a request for new functionality, because we have seen it before, but it was not originally part of the archiving template bot notice params, which were these four: |archive_bot=, |archive_age=, |archive_units=, and |minthreadsleft=. The first appearance of minthreadstoarchive in the bot notice occurred a year ago, and was kind of piggy-backed into an altogether different project which did not involve changing any wording in the bot notice at all, but was designed solely to automate the bot notice so it would produce exactly the wording that was there before, so readers would see no difference at all, and editors would no longer have to manually add separate bot notice params and sync them up with archive bot config params every time the config params were added or modified. During the somewhat complex implementation of the bot notice automation, various wording change proposals were made at the same time. I don't recall the minthreadstoarchive as ever having achieved consensus, and may have been in a sandbox version or even live for a while during automation development, but either there was consensus against, or it just fizzled, I don't really recall anymore.

Put another way: the minthreadstoarchive parameter historically was not present in the bot notice emitted by the Talk header template or the Archive box template before the automation project got underway last year. Since the automation upgrade was designed to automate the four params that were already there, it did not automate minthreadstoarchive because it wasn't one of the four in use, and there was nothing to automate. It seems to have been added for a while, as one of several wording change proposals that were going on around the same time, but I guess it didn't stick.

I just wanted to correct the historical record about minthreadstoarchive as not something that got "dropped": it couldn't be dropped, because it was never there originally; it made an appearance during the wording change proposals coterminous with the automation project, and failed to be retained for whatever reason. I'm agnostic as to whether it should or shouldn't be added now, and as this is a time when we are raising all sorts of proposals about wording of the bot notice, that is certainly an appropriate issue to address. However, it is not a return to longstanding practice, it is an add-on. Mathglot (talk) 00:23, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Okay, I found the previous discussion about this, here. Skip the pre-April 2024 part of that discussion, which was mostly a comedy of errors. Adding previous discussant Tollens. Mathglot (talk) 08:16, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

In that discussion (Template talk:Talk header/Archive 12#minimum number of sections archived), User:Sdkb told me |minthreadstoarchive= is currently displayed in the tooltip (along with the specific bot that does the archiving). That's what I'm basing this on. I've always assumed the "got lost in the shuffle" was an honest mistake, a dropped ball without being intentional. Because why would we leave the notice incomplete? I will note that there was a time when the archive bot notice was not part of Talk header. I fear the intricacy of archive bots seems to have been underestimated. Now editors argue that Talk header is already complex and large enough so we should be content with a half-assed bot notice. Had the archive bot notice been allowed to live on, and progress, in stand-alone templates instead of being folded into the already super complex Talk header I'm positive we would have a satisfying mention/explanation of what a setting of |minthreadstoarchive= can lead to; since everybody would have considered providing a full explanation the obvious and natural thing to do. CapnZapp (talk) 13:06, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

It wasn't a dropped ball, though. I think either it wasn't there at the time and Sdkb got momentarily confused given everything that was going on during an intense period of change, or it was there, briefly, during testing or something and that's the moment when Sdkb responded; I really can't recall the sequence of events. Anyway, it wasn't there before the automation project, and it wasn't there after it, so the project did what it was supposed to do. I don't know how much is riding on this dropped-ball idea, but I don't think it really matters if it was there before or not; if it is a good idea now and there is consensus for it, it should be added, and if there isn't, it shouldn't. Mathglot (talk) 18:35, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I think I may have been confusing |minthreadstoarchive= with |minthreadsleft=. The latter is in the tooltip as e.g. when more than 4 threads are present; I don't think the former (e.g. 4 at a time) has ever been present. I don't have any objection to adding it to the tooltip, although I wouldn't want to see it any more prominent than that due to banner blindness. |minthreadstoarchive= also just seems like a fairly niche parameter that viewers of a talk page are unlikely to really care about, so I also don't think we really have a crisis in not displaying it currently. Sdkb ^talk 20:05, 13 August 2025 (UTC) (please  mention me on reply)

Leaving arcane configuration details out of view when they are of no interest whatsoever to effectively 100% of readers is not "half assed". –jacobolus (t) 18:48, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Proposal to proceed with Archives (only)

Anyway. To proceed in a constructive manner, how about this: We concede that Talk header isn't the place for the full archive bot notice, as a tooltip it's already overloaded, and have our documentation tell users to only use its archive bot notice subsection for the easy cases (a vast majority of page config is content with |minthreadstoarchive=1), and we implement a fuller message in {{Archives}}, the only(?) surviving stand-alone talk page archive template. If you set minthreadstoarchive (or the ClueBot II equivalent, |minarchthreads=) to any value greater than 1 (a fully valid use case, btw); use Archives and suppress the archive bot notice subsection of Talk header. (In fact, why don't we make this automatic - if Talk header senses the presence of Archives and/or that minthreadstoarchive >1, it automatically turns off its archive bot notice subsection?) At Archives the message is thankfully not just a tooltip, it's fully presented as several lines of text right in the template: it can easily handle one more line, if that is what it takes to finally solve the issue: i.e. by explaining to users that their config makes the bot only act when so many sections are ripe for archiving in a single go. The work to find out which pages set minthreadstoarchive to a number greater than 1 has already been done; we can then add {{Archives}} to those pages. Regards CapnZapp (talk) 13:06, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

See: User talk:Timeshifter/Sandbox291.

A suggested box below for {{archives|banner=yes}} when there is no archive yet. So a search form would not yet be needed.

--Timeshifter (talk) 14:37, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

What about this version? It's much shorter and says the same thing.

Or, if the |minarchthreads= parameter is set to more than 2:

FaviFake (talk) 14:52, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I removed the indentation on the boxes so that they are full width. minarchthreads can be set to 2, but 3 sections may be ready to archive by the time the bot makes its appearance. Thus my wording. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:17, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understood your comment. FaviFake (talk) 15:34, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

What Ts meant, I think, is that your "in pairs" or "4 at a time" language, nice as it is, is not true. It isn't "4 at a time", it's "at least 4". I suppose you could say, "4 or more at a time", bu tis that better than "at least 4"? Mathglot (talk) 18:44, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, got it. Why can't we just use "at least 4 at a time" then?

Still, I think using a much clearer yet not exactly precise wording is better UX. FaviFake (talk) 21:24, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Why "topics" instead of "sections", I wonder? Aaron Liu (talk) 19:13, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Because that's what the software calls them, and it's shorter. And i like it better, honestly. FaviFake (talk) 21:26, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Also, techincally a subsection is still a section, so "topic" is more precise. It's a win-win! FaviFake (talk) 21:26, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Timeshifter's suggestion is clear, easily understandable, written like a natural sentence. Aaron's suggestions have the problem it is easy to overlook that "in pairs." despite this being the crucial information currently lacking. Numbers should be presented as clearly understood digits; people aren't trained on finding numerical information as words. I also think the effort to save space is contra-productive. Finally, we should use the term for sections/discussions/topics most easily understood and used by general users. What the software calls them should not matter at all; in fact using technical terms outside of technical documentation is a typical trap us programmer-like types often fall into. A big thank you both for your constructive approach! CapnZapp (talk) 09:48, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Timeshifter's suggestion is clear, easily understandable, written like a natural sentence

I concede it's easily understandable but to me it definitely doesn't flow like a normal sentence.

Aaron's suggestions

What's Aaron's suggestions?

easy to overlook that "in pairs." despite this being the crucial information currently lacking

Well, I'd argue that's the least important information, as the rest is much more relevant (such as how old a topic needs to be).

Numbers should be presented as clearly understood digits; people aren't trained on finding numerical information as words

Sure, you could just use "2 at a time". It's still much shorter.

we should use the term for sections/discussions/topics most easily understood and used by general users. What the software calls them should not matter at all; in fact using technical terms outside of technical documentation is a typical trap us programmer-like types often fall into

Yeah, that's one of the reason why I chose "topic". Out of the 3 you mentioned, I'd say "topic" is the least technical; but I guess this is subjective.

You too! FaviFake (talk) 10:06, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Haven't read the stuff below but I also have no idea what I have suggested. Aaron Liu (talk) 04:14, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

Sounds like there are two proposals here: one is, "suppress the archive bot notice subsection of Talk header", and I wouldn't support that one, as I am one of the users that does mouse over and read it. The other one appears to be expanding the cleartext (not hidden) message at template Archives, and that should probably be moved there as your message today on that page has already pointed out. Mathglot (talk) 18:50, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

My proposal was to turn off the notice only when the notice wouldn't completely and properly convey the config not in general. When minthreadstoarchive = 1 the bot behave as readers expect it to, and our current notice is therefore unproblematic to display, and I wasn't suggesting turning it off there. The direct problem is instead when minthreadstoarchive > 1; that's how the confusion reported by Redrose64, Timeshifter & Co arises. So how about this template saying nothing rather than saying something directly causing confusion? At least to me, that's perfectly logical. CapnZapp (talk) 10:12, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

"(a vast majority of page config is content with |minthreadstoarchive=1)" – Is that true? Sounds like most pages have misconfigured bots then. "If you set minthreadstoarchive (or the ClueBot II equivalent, |minarchthreads=) to any value greater than 1 (a fully valid use case, btw); use Archives" – No, that's an absurd recommendation, to which I am very strongly opposed. "At Archives the message is thankfully not just a tooltip, it's fully presented as several lines of text right in the template" – yes, that version is distracting and unhelpful and should generally be removed from talk pages unless the article's main author stridently insists (in which case, whatever, it's not worth arguing about). –jacobolus (t) 18:52, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

user:jacobolus: I have read your comments with rising concern. Honestly at this point I don't see that you are acknowledging the problem your fellow editors are reporting. You come across as not caring about the details just as long as you keep down the size and complexity of this template. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. When you think the bot config is "misconfigured" when it sets |minthreadstoarchive=1 that's frankly a strong indicator you don't know what you're talking about. (minthreadstoarchive=1 is very common and fully legit, and so is minthreadstoarchive=2. The benefit of minthreadstoarchive=1 is chiefly this is the only value for this parameter that makes the bot act as newcomers expect, and thus is valuable for not causing confusion. In fact so much so that another discussion made a strong push to make minthreadstoarchive=1 the default) You also do not appear to sympathize that the archive bot notice once was not part of Talk header and thus has been forced into a very constrictive context? Can you say for certain you understand how certain settings of the bot config can make users not understand why the bot doesn't archive their content, how that inconveniences your fellow editors, and how this in no small part is because the current templates (Talk header and Archives) fail to fully inform the users? Because if you don't want to acknowledge the actual problems others are having, I honestly don't think your comments should carry as much weight as comments from those who do. If you want to display good faith, please exhibit an understanding of the problems and positions held by your fellow editors, and, if you must, directly address the concerns you have with these, instead of talking around, ignoring or dismissing their concerns. Thank you very much, CapnZapp (talk) 09:33, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

@CapnZapp Yes, I reject the "problem" you have. It is not a significant issue, and is only of concern to a trivial number of people. The trivial workaround is to look at the page source. You seem to neither understand nor care about the trade-off involved, and you are willing to impose a cost on a much larger number of people (basically everyone on the site) without any consideration. That ends up leading to bad design which is self indulgent and frankly rude. –jacobolus (t) 10:18, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Your diagnosis of editor complaints about the bot does not seem accurate. The chief problem I see when I look at reader complaints somewhere like User talk:Σ is over-aggressive bot configuration resulting in archiving that happens too fast and cuts short discussion, with users not understanding why their recent discussion was apparently deleted; this is a bot behavior problem, not a talk header presentation problem, and is best proximately treated by relaxing the bot configuration case by case, and best treated at bigger scale / in the longer term by presenting better (less aggressive) configuration defaults in the bot config documentation, and possibly by taking a better census of existing bot configurations and adjusting them to be less aggressive on most low-traffic talk pages. –jacobolus (t) 10:25, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Can you at least understand that this, your comments just now, are perceived as much more constructive, since now there's at least something to talk about, where previously you came across as dismissive and or not understanding of the issue? Let me ping those with the issues @Redrose64 and Timeshifter:; they (and perhaps others they in turn can bring here) are better equipped to tell you their issues than I am. I fully agree the first step must be to agree there even is a problem. I just wish you began making clear you're not agreeing one exists. CapnZapp (talk) 10:39, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Could someone please explain what exactly the issue is? I've read a few messages and have been pinged a few times but can't figure out what you're debating about. FaviFake (talk) 10:53, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

@FaviFake the question on this topic is about what content to include in the talk-header banner shown on a significant proportion of all article talk pages. Currently, whenever an automatic archiving bot is set up for the page, there is a line in the banner that says something like: "Auto-archiving period: 12 months", with a hover popup including further information, along the lines of: "Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III after 365 days of inactivity when more than 5 threads are present."

The question is whether this notice is sufficient, or whether the popup should also describe the setting of the minthreadstoarchive parameter, which would change the text to something along the lines of "Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III after 365 days of inactivity when at least 2 threads could be archived leaving behind no fewer than 5 threads."

In my opinion, this is an unnecessary and distracting additional detail which readers don't need to care about, which can't be explained concisely enough to bother putting here. Talk page readers for whom the details of the bot config matters (a trivially small proportion of all readers) can trivially click to see the page source and read the bot config directly there. I think people's main problem with archive bots is poor configuration, substantially caused by poor recommendations in the archive bot documentation and existing pages since most people setting up new archiving just copy/paste from an existing config. I speculate that nothing we change in the visible message about the bot config in the talk header banner will have any appreciable effect whatsoever on readers' issues with the archive bots. But I generally want to keep the talk banner as simple and concise as possible, because it is one of the most widely used templates on Wikipedia.

However, CapnZapp is deeply troubled by[edit: apparently considers it unacceptable] not having the full specification of the archive bot config in the message, and seems to believe that not including it is a betrayal of some past promise. (I don't really understand that part.) –jacobolus (t) 23:37, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Please avoid making this personal. It makes you come across as not in good faith. There is absolutely no constructive reason for you to try to paint a picture of me fighting for this on my lonesome. And you absolutely need to cut out language such as deeply troubled or I'll report you for incivility and harassment. This stops right here and now, user:jacobolus. CapnZapp (talk) 10:07, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

I was trying to share my impression, not put words in your mouth. I'm happy to strike that. While you are considering incivility, personalization, and "harassment", consider that you recently claimed that I "come across as not caring" and "don't know what [I'm] talking about", and that you "honestly don't think [my] comments should carry as much weight". You might want to tone down your own sensationalism and personal remarks if you don't want to give people the wrong idea. –jacobolus (t) 15:37, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

@FaviFake: To sum up. Something like the following open text would be substituted in place of the hover text. There would be no hover text. CapnZapp doesn't want the info buried there. I agree. See example below. {{Search box}} and archive list need to be filled in correctly. I just put placeholders in for now. Search box actually works though to search the archives of this page. Narrow browser window to see that the archive list will wrap. Pinging Mathglot and Aaron Liu too.

If it can't be in {{talk header}}, then it will be in {{archives}}. Talk page editors could agree to use it by itself, or like this:

{{Talk header|noarchive=yes|search=no}}
{{archives|banner=yes}}

This way there is no duplication in {{talk header}}.

So talk page editors can decide whether they want open explanatory text, or hidden partially explanatory text via a tooltip. Mobile users can't see tooltip info normally.

--Timeshifter (talk) 07:10, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Wait what? Since when was that the proposal? I thought your desire was only to modify the hover text.

Replacing the hover text with a directly displayed message is completely unacceptable here, unless you first shop this by the broader wikipedia community to get consensus. Remember: this template is shown on a huge proportion of all talk pages. –jacobolus (t) 15:49, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

It's just a proposal. As I wrote above: "If it can't be in {{talk header}}, then it will be in {{archives}}." To avoid duplication please respond at the end of this section where there is more discussion. --Timeshifter (talk) 15:57, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

I'm having trouble understanding this. I understand that there's a proposal to add the minthreadstoarchive thing to the automatic archives blurb, but what exactly would the separation of the TalkHeader archives notice from the Archives template look like? See also Template:Talk header/testcases for the above proposal to replace that section of the TalkHeader with a transclusion of Archives; they really aren't too different at all. Aaron Liu (talk) 21:28, 13 August 2025 (UTC)

Hi, Aaron. I don't understand, "the separation of the TalkHeader archives notice from the Archives template"; can you elaborate?

To fully understand this section, you should probably know that there is a backstory. I almost hesitate to bring it up, as the discussions there have exhausted me with little to show for it, and I don't wish to resurrect it or be drawn in if it metastasizes. However, it's not fair to hide relevant prior comment, so there you go. I am happy to confirm process or provide factual data upon request (but see here first). Best, Mathglot (talk) 01:09, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Besides the minthreadstoarchive thing of course, Zapp proposes a compromise to concede that Talk header isn't the place for the full archive bot notice and to make the template depart from Archives is what I currently understand. I don't understand on which aspects exactly this will depart. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:22, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I will readily admit I am not making a technical suggestion fully informed by the particulars. My thinking goes thus: if Talk header's bot notice detects it is not giving out complete and accurate info, such as when minthreadstoarchive is set to a greater value than 1 (or is left to its default value, also 2), then that notice is contraproductive since it is incomplete. Why not then refuse to say anything, rather then saying something not good enough? Turning it off also makes it obvious something is afoot, and readers will read our template's documentation, which obviously need to explain the situation and recommend users to add Archives. Of course I now assume it *does* have the functionality to tell the full story (as in your and Timeshifter's proposals, just above the Arbitrary break above I just inserted). I have zero clue whether this is easy or hard to implement. That was my thought. CapnZapp (talk) 09:57, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Again without reading the below comments: Disabling the blurb when the archives template is configured a certain way would go against the reason for Jacob(please tell me I remembered the right name)'s reason to oppose in the first place: that while the other details are of interest to general readers, minthreadstoarchive is not, in his opinion. Doing what you say would remove details of interest to readers. Aaron Liu (talk) 04:18, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

We don't need the full archive bot notice. We need my shorter notice copied from the banner below.

If you look at the tooltip under "Auto-archiving period" in the {{talk header}} at the top of the page you will see that the text there is longer than the more informative text (with minarchthreads info) below:

So the text in the banner could be the tooltip text when there are archives.

I think trying to incorporate {{archives}} into {{talk header}}, either partially or fully, is way too complicated, and unnecessary.

I just showed how to solve the lack of minarchthreads info in {{talk header}}. What happens at {{archives}} should be separate. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:37, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I think we should really try to get rid off {{archives}} sidebox variant as much as we can. It really is a relic of the vector 2010 skin times when the TOC was a smilar box-ish thing and not in the sidebar.

with Vector 2022 as the new norm, just having a page with {{talk header}} that auto-generates the archives banner style, reading auto-archiving settings and search, there just isn't a need very many times for the standalone template - so maybe just outright deprecation would be preferable?

Or having the option to have the {{archives}} produce a banner by default that has all the functionality that the {{talk header}} currently has, maybe we could even just transclude it into it then so that changes are automatic? (though the runtime cost of that extra transclusion might be a non-starter, given that tph is on so many pages.. Raladic (talk) 05:36, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

I can certainly understand a desire to simplify and streamline. The problem is that there exists a definite need for something to tell users when |minthreadstoarchive= is set to a value greater than 1, since that is a definite source of confusion some users report having to deal with, including User:Redrose64. The issue regarding simplification is that if Talk header, this template, becomes the only way to express the archive bot notice (without reading page source), there is strong resistance to the effort of this template providing all the details you need, in order to understand why the bot isn't archiving your talk section (because it is configured to wait until more sections can be archived in one swoop). One issue is this template is already very complex; people hesitate to make it more complex. Another major issue is that the efforts to simplify have relegated the archive bot notice to only a tooltip, and it's way overlong already.

What is needed (for pages with non-trivial archive bot config) is the space to be able to inform the user in a natural friendly "breathing" manner exactly how the bot is configured. A non-hidden multi-line text really is the only feasible way to say this in a non-contorted manner; that's why I suggested lets leave Talk header alone and focus on the only(?) remaining stand-alone archive template (Archives). Trying to convey all needed info regarding a talk page's automatic archiving in a very short abbreviated manner is imo a fool's errand: the point is to give non-technical readers the insight they need - the only way is to use natural (verbose) language, and not try to cram it in.

In other words, you need to somehow reconcile the strong drive to simplify and save space with the definite need for the opposite. Personally, I'm just about to give up on ever convincing people Talk header's archive bot notice subsection can become truly functional, because giving it enough room to breathe is directly against the drive to compress. I am assuming people aren't opposed to providing enough and complete information overall, but so far I'm resisted with few constructive suggestions how else to proceed: If the Talk header people (you reading this) won't allow Talk header to provide this information in a non-constrictive manner, then you need to tell us where we should and can add it! (My suggestion at the mo is {{Archives}} mostly because I can't see where else) In other words, removing Archives (and other stand-alone archive-related templates) AND refusing to expand Talk header is, unfortunately, the functional equivalent to "I'm happy with the bot notice being incomplete and dysfunctional; I care little for how other editors have to deal with constant confusion".

tl;dr: the problem isn't with the complexity of archiving bots; the problem is we're not giving the room needed to explain the config to users in a natural friendly (verbose) manner. Users aren't reading documentation and they certainly aren't parsing page source. Clearly what's needed is for at least ONE template to exist that uses a multi-line non-hidden message to detail how a specific page's config is set up in plain English. The options are not hard to understand, unless you're trying to convey the message in a contorted manner, say a single-line tooltip so long it disappears before you have time to read and grok it properly. CapnZapp (talk) 09:16, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

OK. It looks like whenever there is minthreadstoarchive (or minarchthreads) greater than 1 then the open-text explanatory info will have to come from {{archives}}. Here is one way:

{{Talk header|noarchive=yes|search=no}}
{{archives|banner=yes}}

This way there is no duplication in {{talk header}}.

Making these changes on talk pages can be done manually for now. Maybe someone could create a bot to do it. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:10, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

Currently neither Talk header nor Archives allow for the information about minthreadstoarchive. (Try adding {{Archives}} to my example talk Talk:Kármán line. Neither the existing Talk header nor the Archives I insert give readers any hint their talk sections might not archive, because the bot is instructed to hold off until it can archive 2 or more sections in one go (which is the cause of the confusion editors are having). I don't know of any other template that offers this functionality either, or any other solution at all. That's why I started a discussion. CapnZapp (talk) 10:02, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

@CapnZapp: OK. I knew it needed to be implemented in {{archives}}. This was just an idea of how to get it to work in the end. Here below is the current banner: {{archives|banner=yes}}

Here below is a possible future implementation I threw together. Needs someone with a lot more coding experience than me to finish it, and put it in {{archives}}.

Search form (from {{Search box}}) works in searching the archives for this page. Narrow browser window to see that the archive links can wrap to 2 lines. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:06, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Clearing things up

Ok so apparently my request to clear things up made them even more complicated. So, here are my thoughts in a simple list; i don't care about who proposed what or if it was proposed at all in this discussion:

1. Would lists or shorter messages illustrate our points better compared to walls of texts? Yes.
2. Should the {{Talk header}} tooltip be removed and the text be displayed in plainext? Absolutely not. This is against all UX guidelines.
   • (added to this list on 22:02, 16 August 2025 (UTC)) Should an optional parameter to display the text outside of the tooltip be added? No, there are no cases where it is that important to have it displayed. I also oppose an option to hide the plaintext sentence behind a [show] button, because the behaviour would be inconsistent between talk pages.
3. Should the tooltip be removed? No, it's useful and not annoying.
4. Should the tooltip be shortened? Yes, it think it's currently too verbose.
   • How? My suggestion is Topics older than 6 months are auto-archived 4 at a time by ClueBot III if there are more than 9.. Every small deviation from the original is intentional.
5. Should |minthreadsarchived= be added to and displayed on the tooltip? Yes but it must be a very short addition. I am very willing to mislead the user slightly if it means a smaller text will be shown. The above, while incorrect, is the max length I'm willing to add, it can't be longer than "4 at a time". Adding an entire subclause at the end is extremely confusing and unnecessarily makes it even more complex.
6. Should the two talk templates be merged in some form? I don't care, as long as the conditions above are met.

Have I missed anything? FaviFake (talk) 21:08, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for your concise list of your views on a lot of points. It is an alternative approach to something I have been thinking about, which is just to get an inventory of all the different suggestions because there have been quite a few, and I am losing track. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that your bullet 4 suggestion won't work, because the "4 at a time" part is inaccurate; that isn't how it works. That is, it will not archive in multiples of 4, it might archive 7, or 9, or 10, and so on. You seem to know this, by your follow-up point, but are you really saying you prefer brevity in the message, even at the cost of inaccuracy? Because that is what it sounds like. Mathglot (talk) 21:58, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. I hope others do the same. Could you explain exactly in what cases there could be many sections archived if min=4? I might not have understood the situation correctly. Wouldn't it be somewhat rare? FaviFake (talk) 22:00, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Sure; the aging param |algo= determines discussion staleness (age of last comment in the section) and stale sections become eligible for archiving, unless blocked by one of the two throttling params |minthreadsleft=N, which blocks archiving if it would leave <N sections on the page, and |minthreadstoarchive=M, which blocks archiving if there are fewer than M stale sections. If 5 go stale before the bot shows up, 5 would get archived. Yes, it would probably be rare, imho. Mathglot (talk) 22:26, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

That makes sense. I still think this is worth the compromise in language. FaviFake (talk) 22:29, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't think anyone will be confused if the message says "2 at a time" and the bot archives 5 topics. The alternative would be to just drop that phrase. –jacobolus (t) 22:10, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

I couldn't support an intentionally misleading explanation on a Talk page, but I am not opposed to just dropping it, if that finesses the problem. (Both of those options should go into a neutral, "proposal inventory" to help us track all this.) Mathglot (talk) 22:21, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

I support FaviFake proposal:

Topics older than 6 months are auto-archived 4 at a time by ClueBot III if there are more than 9..

I also support this {{archives}} alternative if talk page editors want a more verbose, and more visible, explanation:

Let the editors of a talk page decide. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:49, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, I mentioned the addition of an optinal parameter in my list. To help other editors, you and the other partecipants CapnZapp, Aaron Liu, and jacobolus might want to consider publishing a similar list. I still have close to no idea where you stand on the issue, and I (and I suspect other editors too) wish not to read the previous, long-winded discussions.--FaviFake (talk) 22:02, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

In your previous mention of an optional param (point 2 @21:08 above) you said you were dead set against it. Not quite sure why you raised it again now—is that because you have changed your mind? I guess I just don't understand what you are saying. Mathglot (talk) 22:38, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

I may have misunderstood the previous discussions! point 2 @21:08 talked about a removal of the tooltip with no option to add it back, while point 2 bullet was about an optional parameter that would leave the default tooltip unless activated. Please tell me if I've misunderstood Timishifter's previous comments regarding tooltip removals. I assumed their initial proposal would have changed the default display. FaviFake (talk) 22:55, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

I'd like to, but I can't really help you with whether you have misunderstood something or not (but I sympathize!). Honestly, there have been so many proposals, and slight alteration of previous proposals, and dropping of one proposal for another, and offshoots of proposals, that it would take a cladogram to see how they all relate. One shouldn't have to comprehensively have read everything about a topic in various discussions, pages, and archives and have a photographic memory about the history of it all in order to understand and contribute. I think I am going to forego posting my opinion for a while. I think with time, things will shake out and become clearer, and then it may make more sense to. I am always willing to answer specific, fact-based questions about templates and so on like the one you had above, so feel free to ping me anytime. Mathglot (talk) 23:17, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I agree. I may do the same if the walls of text continue. Thanks! FaviFake (talk) 00:27, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

@FaviFake I think your proposed text seems fine, or the current stable version is also fine.

I would advise people to avoid use of the {{archives}} template as a full-width banner, and I think the appearance of that template as a right-floating box has been somewhat harmed by recent changes, relative to my recollection. If I remember correctly the elements listed in the bot notice used to be each optional, so the display could be simplified to only show the most important ones, but now the only way to simplify the display is to throw in "nobot=yes". My advice to folks working on {{archives}} would be to imitate the style of the talk header banner, leaving only a human-readable date as an immediately visible feature and showing most archive config details such as the name of the bot in a tooltip instead.

I would recommend against adding bot-config-related optional parameters to the talk header template. –jacobolus (t) 22:49, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

I want access to at least one way to provide a full explanation ("more verbose, and more visible") with no tooltips, no abbreviations, no minimal word count. Including support for all configurations of the bot; just like when the templates didn't read the bot config automatically, and you could use the four |archive_bot=, |archive_age=, |archive_units=, and |minthreadsleft= parameters to inform the reader. I genuinely think the point (getting readers to actually read the bot parameters to the point they understand when the bot might not act) is lost if the message isn't allowed to be full, complete and accurate. Since it appears there is no hope Talk header will be allowed to support something like User:Timeshifter's Archives mock-up above (posted at 04:49, 16 August 2025) I support it for Archives instead. Allowing a specialized template like Archives to display the message in full sounds logical and useful. Let's just hope everything works when Archives are used in the standard appearance (right-floating box, not full-width banner). As for Talk header, do with it what you will; as far as I can see every proposal for it is compromised. CapnZapp (talk) 00:34, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

Fact check: when the templates didn't read the bot config automatically, and you could use the four parameters to specify the bot notice independently, they were displayed in the tooltip, same place they are now. The sandbox now has rev. 1193759647 of 13:45, 5 January 2024 (not sure how long it will remain there) and you can run it with the bot notice params to see what it used to do. For example:

Sample Tallk header template with manual bot notice params

If the sandbox is still on rev. 1193759647 of 13:45, 5 January 2024, then this test will show the use of template {{talk header}} as it was on that date. {{Talk header/sandbox|archive_age=6 |archive_units=fortnights |bot=Cluebot VII |minthreadsleft=5}} ⟶ Mouse over auto-archiving period to see the bot notice params in the pop-up tooltip, as it was at that time. This is a live demo: all the links work, as does the search box. (Note: this demo will eventually age out and stop working, when someone takes over the sandbox.)

The bot notice appeared in a pop-up tooltip back then, and it still does today except it works automatically now, without the need for the four params. Mathglot (talk) 02:04, 17 August 2025 (UTC)