When talk pages -- like article pages -- become larger than 32kb, they cannot be edited in some users because of browser page size limits. Moreover, such large texts become bulky, difficult to navigate, and place a burden on users with slow (dialup) connections.
It is therefore customary on Ireland Information Guide to periodically archive older discussions on page that have become large. The following will explain step-by-step the best procedure for archivig a talk page. (Note: Utilizing the "Move this page" feature for such an operation is not at all advised.)
Please note that refactoring a talk page is an alternative to archiving it.
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Cutting and pasting the text to be archived into a new page is considered the best method for archiving a Talk page.
When archiving old discussions, it is customary to leave current, ongoing discussions on the existing Talk page. In some cases, a header text is also preserved.
For example, to archive the discussion on the talk page of this article:
1. Start at the Talk page.
2. Click on "Edit this page".
3. At the top of the edit area, type in:
4. Click on show preview.
5. Once the preview is on your screen, highlight the desired text in the edit box.
6. Cut the desired text from the page using CTRL-X or the Cut command in the menu bar.
7. Click on the red colored "Ireland Information Guide talk:How to archive a talk page/archive1" that is in the preview text. This will open a new page with an empty edit area.
8. Paste (using CTRL-V or the Paste command in the menu bar) the desired text into the new page ("Ireland Information Guide talk:How to archive a talk page/archive1") and the click on "Save page".
9. Lastly, place a "Ireland Information Guide talk:How to archive a talk page/archive1" link into the "Ireland Information Guide talk:How to archive a talk page" page (preferably at the top).
In due time, you would end up with a sequence of archives files named Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3 and so forth.
To complement or replace a series of sequential archives, consider organising archives by sub-topic. This is less appropriate for personal Talk pages than for Talk pages in the article or Ireland Information Guide namespace, where it may be desirable to be able to refer to earlier discussions quickly.
Good examples of sequential archives can be found at Ireland Information Guide talk:Deletion policy and Ireland Information Guide talk:Naming conventions
Sometimes subpages under the given Talk page are appropriate. Other times, it may be best to move comments to the Talk page of a logically related article. So, for example, a discussion of French politics at Talk:France could be moved to the talk page of the Politics of France article.
In general, if you have two or more sequential archives, organising archives by topic may be a better alternative.
For certain discussion pages, particularly those concerned with policy, which don't lend themselves to organising by topic, the following alternative archiving strategy may be preferable.
In this method, texts are simply deleted from a page and not moved to a different file. To reference an earlier discussion, you simply provide a link to an earlier version of the page. All discussions remain in one monolithic page file. One small caveat: it is not possible to link to an earlier version of a page with a Ireland Information Guide style link. You have to supply the full URL.
To create a link to an earlier version of a Talk page:
You would then format this like this:
The final result will look like this::
This archiving strategy can be particularly useful for summarising discussions; you provide a succinct overview of the various points of view and a link to the complete discussion.
Separate archive files have the advantage that they are indexed and can be searched, whereas this is not the case with the monolithic approach. This should be taken into consideration for pages where people repeatedly ask the same kinds of questions and it is useful to be to search the archives.
In closing, there are no fixed rules about archiving discussions on Ireland Information Guide. Certain extremely busy pages like Village Pump eventually evolve their own archiving strategy.