Tardis:Archiving policy

Discussion is encouraged on the TARDIS Index File, however to continue to provide a place for discussion to take place discussion pages must be archived when they become too large and difficult to navigate.

Archiving, rather than just deleting the comments is done for two reasons; to preserve discussions for future reference and to prevent out of date information clouding current event discussions.

Article talk pages
An article talk page should be archived when it; Exceeds 10 topics of discussion or has exceeded 50KB (50,000 bytes).

This must only be done when the primarily active discussions have been resolved or gone cold. In the case of the latter a cold discussion is 2 months following the the last post to the subsection.

Archiving of article talk pages can only be done by an admin, as they can utilise the archive tool to efficiently archive a page. Using this tool preserves the page's history on the main talk page whilst cutting and pasting the page to an archive page.

User talk archiving
Users may freely remove comments from their own talk pages or totally blanking their page without archiving. However, it should be noted that all content on a wiki is still preserved within a page's history, even talk pages.

Archiving is an alternate method of preservation of a user talk page. Users can remove the entirety of a talk page or sections of it.

To create a talk page users can create a new sub-page of their user talk page by using the user talk archives template which will enable them to create a link to Talk:USERNAME/Archive 1. Content can then be cut and pasted to the archive leaving a clear talk page.

Forums
Forums are regularly archived, generally 2 months after the last major edit, major edits are defined as signed edits (and exclude maintenance edits).

Discussions that have been started and then been resolved with a definite close may be archived sooner than 2 months following the last edit.

Forum archives and information on how to archive the three parts of the forums can be found at their individual pages:
 * Forum:Panopticon archives
 * Forum:Reference desk archives
 * Howling:The Howling archives