Proposal to drop archiving params[edit]

Editors interested in this template may be interested in the discussion Template talk:Talk header#Proposal to drop archiving params. Template talk:Talk header has recently been updated to automatically derive archive bot params, and this is being imported here; the sandbox currently has a version of it, but it is not working yet. See Template:Archives/sandbox. Mathglot (talk) 10:56, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support Once the code for Talk header is functional and bug-free, do feel free to implement the same functionality for this and any other alternative template. To clarify: the proposal I'm supporting is not merely to drop the support for those params. I am supporting the drop iff their role in the display of archiving params is replaced as mentioned. CapnZapp (talk) 12:13, 1 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to further edits by Tollens, at first glance this appears to be working now, but there aren't any test cases for it yet, so it's not ready to be released until there are; I'll try and add some. Mathglot (talk) 07:49, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Initial remote test cases added here reveal one problem in the |banner=yes version, with the full caption squeezed into col 1; probably just needs a colspan=2 added at the right point. Mathglot (talk) 02:53, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And to further edits by Aidan9382 as well to fix the banner issue. There has been little discussion in a month, so I verified test cases and released this to live. Remember that new param |nobot=yes will suppress the automatic bot notice; doc updates to follow. Mathglot (talk) 05:06, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Just to be clear, I just added ((Archives)) to Talk:Gravity (2013 film) (only in the preview of course, I didn't save my edit), and it does not appear to handle |minthreadstoarchive= which is used there. I expected the text to say "This page has archives. Sections older than 120 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 5 sections are present if 2 or more threads are eligible for archiving." (my underlining). If you are still working on it, feel free to ignore this. I am just posting this because I got the impression from the previous comment development was considered finished. Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 14:14, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That is correct, it doesn't handle minthreadstoarchive, and never did, so that is the expected behavior. The ((Talk header)) template won't display it either, except in the sandbox version only developed yesterday, and remains pending further test case development and testing before it is released there. I think you might be confusing two things: the automation of the bot notice, which was released a while ago at ((Talk header)) and just released here, and the requested change to the bot notice wording which you proposed, which is a new feature now in testing at ((Talk header)), but never developed here. Mathglot (talk) 18:13, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of course I'd like this template to correctly display the same information as talk header. Once development of ((Talk header)) is complete, I hope the same or similar handling of |minthreadstoarchive= is implemented here as well. CapnZapp (talk) 17:10, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is a serious regression which makes me want to just ditch this template from pages I care about in preference for some more reader friendly template. Showing the name of the bot is usually distracting noise. Writing the archive age as "730 days" vs. "2 years" is much harder for readers to interpret. Is there any way to get the old behavior? –jacobolus (t) 21:55, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I would tend to agree somewhat for this template. The reason the change was made here was that a similar change was made at Template:Talk header, but the change there is just in a tooltip, unlike this one. I completely agree that the name of the bot should basically never be visible directly on the page, and somehow I don't think any of us considered conversion to months or years, though that wouldn't be difficult to implement. The importance of this change in my mind is that it prevents incorrect archive notices (and there are quite a number of those). I'm really not sure how to feel about this one.
One idea that might make everyone happy would be to display information only for parameters which have any value, rather than making it an all-or-nothing situation like nobot=. That way the information presented wouldn't be any more or less than what had already been set, and in the future a simple =yes or something along those lines would work for those parameters. Would that work in your case, assuming conversion to larger timescales was implemented as well, Jacobolus? Tollens (talk) 22:10, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the bot name (or other irrelevant config trivia) is in a tooltip that's fine with me. I just don't think we should be shoving these long and confusing bot names in every talk page reader's face. Anyone who cares about that can easily look at the page source.
Dates should ideally be rounded to the largest reasonably accurate unit, e.g. 30 or 31 days should be presented as "1 month" but 45 days should probably say either "6 weeks" or "1.5 months". Anything between 720–740 days should probably present as "2 years", but 550 days can plausibly be presented as either "1.5 years" or "18 months". I don't know if there's an existing facility in mediawiki/wikipedia for fuzzy time names. –jacobolus (t) 22:18, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see the value in spending a lot of effort in order to fuzzy our parameter reporting. I'm completely fine with reporting 30d, 60d, 90d, and 120d as "30 days", "60 days", "90 days" and "120 days" respectively. Seeing "1 month" reported only to have to look at the actual parameters in order to understand if the period set is 30d or 31d (or 28d or 32d) is what seems like a downgrade to me. If anything, how about instead upgrading lowercase sigmabot to accept the full gamut of date units (so you can write 1m for one month, or 4w instead of 28d and so on and so on) - then we can simply report exactly what's written, trusting the editor to have made the choice between 4w and 30d and 1m, say. CapnZapp (talk) 17:24, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Relatively few people care about the bot config whatsoever (nor should they), and effectively nobody cares even a tiny bit about the precise number of days before bot archiving will happen, when archiving is set to more than a couple weeks. The config is done in terms of hours or days because that was convenient for machines, but it's an illegible and irrelevant unit for humans, who should not be distracted by an excessively pedantic summary making them try to calculate precisely how many months or years are in 740 hours or 1800 days or whatever. The point of these archiving bots is to (ideally conservatively) prevent talk pages from ballooning to unwieldy length and to prevent people from answering decades-old stale discussions with irrelevant new comments, not to enforce some kind of precise bureaucratic deadlines. –jacobolus (t) 17:32, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doc update[edit]

I always found this page hard to understand, so I've done some reorganization for clarity. A few paragraphs stuck in the middle of the parameters section made no sense to me there, so I moved them down to section § Notes, but it seems a mixed bag of stuff and I don't think it belongs there, either. Probably it needs to be sliced and diced with pieces shipped off to different parts of the doc. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 08:03, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Without having looked at your changes yet, probably best would be to mirror the documentation section from Talk header. So we document the same thing the same way, I mean. CapnZapp (talk) 14:16, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In its current state, that would be difficult, but a useful task to attack. My changes to doc amounted to an overhaul of the whole page structure including heading names and where they were placed, and not very much on changing any of the parameter descriptions. I definitely wasn't concentrating on the bot-notice part of the doc here, but everything else not involving parameter descriptions, which was one big mess and hard to navigate. The re-org gives the doc a comprehensible ToC with logical subsections, and shorter and tighter intro sections or paragraphs, with more info added where needed in a couple of cases. Except for wikicode reformatting which did not affect the rendered page, I hardly touched the actual parameter descriptions at all. It's very long (28 parameters) and there's a lot of clunky descriptions which could be improved, but I have barely touched them, except to add a couple of explanatory notes in two cases. If you want to improve that section, with or without making them look similar to the Talk page template doc, be my guest; that would be a help. Mathglot (talk) 17:19, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"This page has archives"[edit]

The phrase "This page has archives" that starts off the bot notice in the bottom section predates the recent round of changes. I didn't really take much notice of it before, but I don't know what purpose it serves. This is more noticeable now, in those cases where new param |nobot=yes is in use, because currently the bottom section ends up with that phrase and nothing else, which really seems pointless. But the whole phrase seems pointless to me, and I think we should just get rid of it. Mathglot (talk) 17:31, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree: remove it. I recommend just copying the language from ((talk header)) of something like "Auto-archiving period XX unit", with other config metadata in a tool-tip on auto-archiving period. –jacobolus (t) 00:05, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If it seems pointless to keep the phrase when |nobot= is used, then by all means remove the phrase too (along with the suppressed bot parameters). If the bot parameters are there, I don't see the harm in having a friendly introductory phrase; perhaps tweak it from "This page has archives" to "This page is archived automatically" in order to say something relevant to the following information. CapnZapp (talk) 17:07, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you want the phrasing to be "This page is automatically archived after XX unit", with the tooltip on "This page is automatically archived", that also would be fine. If there's no bot config, it could maybe say "This page is manually archived". –jacobolus (t) 17:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

More examples needed[edit]

A template with 28 parameters needs a lot of examples; currently there are two. On the other hand, we don't want to have dozens of examples in that section, making the page needlessly long. I would propose something like four or five examples showing some of the most popular param combos, and then a subpage Template:Archives/doc/Examples (or maybe Template:Archives/Examples) linked from the #Examples section, for more detailed examples of all of the parameters, or at least the params needing one. Mathglot (talk) 17:58, 29 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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