1. Introduction

As copied from the chatter page

At some point we are going to need a method of archiving long Talk pages. [Q].

found some interesting discussions on the PmWiki mailing lists ... all pretty much procedural in nature and eventually going into the question "what is archiving". I agree that shortening up will be needed at some stage, but it will need some thought ... like will archived stuff still be linkable, searchable ... shortening of a long thread, should that be only in the presentation? or in the editor too?

Also .. what should the markup look like to accomplish tings.

Anyway .. to me it seemed it needed some thought and discussion,

~ Blue Hell

Lots of good points there that need discussion.. how about we start a page for discussion of ArchivingTalk.. plenty of time yet. [Q].

Plenty of time indeed but if ideas pop up, let's talk thHere.

2. Objectives

For what reasons would we want to archive contents.

2.1. Avoid long pages

2.1.1. Problem description

When pages get too long they will not be read. One purpose for archiving could be to cut out old text from a long chat page move it to an archive and maybe link to it. Another point with long pages is that they become harder to editor - the edit overview is not half as nice as the reader overview.

2.1.2. Possible solutions

We could invent some markup to cut off page markup - like the contents would still be there but they would not be shown on reading, on editing only ... something like {-cut-} I guess. Drawbacks .. it would require new things to be added at the top, it would still be long on editing, it would still show up in the TOC prolly. Pro's it would not need an archive, it seems simple to implement (could even use some JavaScript to unfold the details for the reader), it would still show up in the TOC prolly .

Another option could be to manually cut out some text and copy it to a page called something like (Group).Page-Archive - the contents would then be gone in edit mode as well, but the contents would be 'lost' too. Some possible fix could be to have someting like {_Archived-} to indicate there is more in (Group).Page-Archive - or the system could automatically look if such a page exists maybe. Could then add a link to go to the archived bit. This looks a bit like the -Talk page stuff then - markup like.

2.2. Hide unwanted content

2.2.1. Problem description

At some stage page text might be relevant for historic reasons only

At some stage we will be spammed

2.2.2. Possible solutions

Copy old stuff out to some other page - maybe in an Archive group .. for which there would be many .. and add some markup in the original page like (:archive Archive.OriginalGroupName_PageName_SectionId:) to be able to refer to it. This would allow for arbitrary bits to be archived out of a page ... but would need careful naming of the archive page prolly

Why not just delete it (for spam, probably so)?

2.2.3. Delete it?

Why not just delete it...
When a TalkPage gets too long.. an editor could just manually cut out some text from the bottom. It will still be there in the history and can be restored if needed. If there is something in the text that is important.. like a how to.. then that should be transferred the appropriate Page. I am guessing that you have a way to delete spam from the history .