This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the How To guide for Lowercase sigmabot III |
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Sections older than 60 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
Sometimes I want to close a discussion because the original poster did not come back, but I don't want to reset the archive delay. Can we make it so that I could add something like <!-- ignoreSignatureForArchive --> on the same line as the signature to prevent that particular signature from being considered by the archive bot? HighInBC Need help? Just ask. 05:08, 26 June 2021 (UTC)
How do the archive bots determine which sections on a given Talk page are stale (and should be archived)? Do the archive bots read the the dates posted by each poster (via the poster's four-tilde signature) on each scanned Talk page? Acwilson9 (talk) 01:48, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
The ((Consensus)) box says, "Before setting up automatic archiving on an article's talk page, please establish a consensus that archiving is really needed there." Can we please find a way to soften that language a bit? I tend to work on low-traffic (read: neglected) articles, many of which have dozens of decrepit threads dating back to the early days of Wikipedia (e.g. 2004 through 2008). Archiving these has never been controversial, in my experience. — voidxor 19:23, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
The documentation here doesn't state whether ((Archive now))
is supported by lowercase sigmabot III. Would be good to add if it is, and maybe worth implementing if it isn't. AncientWalrus (talk) 12:35, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
Likely the editor writing the documentation for ((Archive now))
was overly optimistic. The lesson learnt here is: it isn't enough to just wish for things to happen.
I've edited the template's documentation. In fact, a case could be made the template should not exist (as a general-purpose template), since it likely only works for pages archived by ClueBot. Compare ((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow))
where it is much more clear the template is tied to a specific archive bot. CapnZapp (talk) 14:02, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis))
has been given the parameter |archivenow=<!-- <nowiki>((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow)),((resolved,((Resolved,((done,((Done,((DONE,((already done,((Already done,((not done,((Not done,((close,((Close,((nd,((xXxX</nowiki> -->
((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow))
(with no parameters), ((resolved))
(possibly with params), ((Resolved))
(possibly with params), ((done))
(possibly with params), etc. etc., it becomes eligible for archive on the next bot run. It has bugs and features: first, it's case-sensitive and won't follow redirects (which is why we need ((resolved,((Resolved
and the others that seem redundant); second, if it matches those characters, it doesn't care about what comes after, so if somebody uses ((ndash))
in a thread, that thread would be archived just as if the thread had contained ((nd))
; third, it ignores the last one in the list, which is why that dummy ((xXxX
is there. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:53, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis))
over there - not ((Archive now))
, which is the template we're discussing here. Perhaps this strengthens the argument this latter template shouldn't exist. Its existence appears based on the assumption that the talk page where it is entered will somehow archive. But this is not the case. Unless there is more facts to be had I see only two cases where this can be true: either that the page is archived automatically (and that the bot in charge is ClueBot AND that its parameters is set up correctly), or, of course, that a fellow editor sees your requests and archives the talk section manually. Perhaps a reasonable course of action would be for its documentation to release the connection to ClueBot and just refer to the manual case... but then I wonder if it isn't better to teach a man how to fish than to just give him one; meaning that perhaps the editor could simply use our various help templates to gain assistance and perhaps even learn how to set up automatic archiving themselves...? CapnZapp (talk) 06:09, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
|archivenow=<!-- <nowiki>((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow)),((Archive now,((resolved,((Resolved,((done,((Done,((DONE,((already done,((Already done,((not done,((Not done,((close,((Close,((nd,((xXxX</nowiki> -->
((Archive now))
(capitalised exactly thus) and archive any threads in which it occurred. So the template can be used to trigger archiving, provided that the page has been set up accordingly. I don't know of an easy way to look for those. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:18, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
((User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow))
. Previously, my thinking was "let's remove this template". My current thinking is "let's keep it for when a user wants archiving but is unsure how to do it themselves". Either way, the documentation should keep the intended usage clear. At least now, the documentation doesn't imply other bots than ClueBot supports the template, or that archiving magically happens by just adding the template to the page. So that's an improvement at least. The documentation still downplays the intricacies of how to get it to work, chiefly because ClueBot's documentation does. But leaving this as is would be tolerable, at least for me. CapnZapp (talk) 14:48, 2 June 2023 (UTC)