Template talk:Talk header#Param search-domain

{{User:ClueBot III/DoNotArchiveUntil|1735665673}}

{{hatnote|Subsections {{slink||Convert Cluebot hours to days?}} and {{slink||minimum number of sections archived}} refactored here, as they are independent of the previous section.}}

One thing that becomes evident with this change, is the somewhat less friendly units used by Cluebot; how long is 2880 hours, anyway? This is not a big deal, but as long as we are talking about these changes, it would be an easy fix to display the hourly total as days (approx. days, decimal days, rounded days; preference?) if it exceeds some threshold number of hours. I think after 96 hours, I pretty much lose it, not sure about anybody else. If you want to see some live examples, check out the bot notice at any of these Talk pages which all use Cluebot: Talk:The Exorcist, Talk:List of colors, Talk:Toronto, Talk:Switzerland, Talk:Macedonia. We could display days in the notice, and exact hours in the Tooltip, if desired. Mathglot (talk) 08:48, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

:I'd suggest rounding anything over 23 hours. I can convert 36, 48, 72 hours, etc. in my head, but it takes some thought. Would rather see that in 1.5 days, 2 days, 3 days format. –Novem Linguae (talk) 10:02, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

:Sure, this sounds fine. Even if it involves some loss of precision, I have a hard time conceiving of any situation where it would matter that a talk pages be archived at a large but precise number of hours. Sdkb ^talk 14:51, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

:: Especially as there's no way to know what kind of delay might be involved before the bot gets around to visiting the page. Mathglot (talk) 23:48, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

:::Delays should not be taken into account. If a page claims archiving will happen after 6 or 18 or 30 or 60 hours, we should probably say that even though the actual arching cadency is just once a day... Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 14:35, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

:: {{done}}. A description of this new functionality can be found at {{slink|Template:Talk header|Archive bot notice|nopage=yes}}; please have a look and adjust as needed. Mathglot (talk) 07:02, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

:::I would not round any hour figure lower than 72. Starting to round already at >23 feels unnecessarily aggressive. CapnZapp (talk) 14:32, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

:::: No worries; it's incredibly easy to change it to any figure that comes out of consensus here. Mathglot (talk) 21:22, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

:::: {{tq|For archiving bots that use hours as the default units, they are converted to days, rounded to the nearest half-day}} This I take to mean ANY number is rounded to a multiple of 12 (half a day). I would suggest a more conservative start. Do not round any hours-number lower than 72 for starters, then let consensus drive rounding of lower numbers. The other way round assumes we will revisit the subject later. I think now is the only time you will hear voices to avoid rounding smaller numbers, so please consider this to be the consensus you'll get. CapnZapp (talk) 09:11, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

::::: Thanks for pointing that out; I neglected to mention the > 23 threshold, so I tweaked the doc, which should be accurate now; sorry for the confusion. As far as what the threshold should be, 72 sounds fine, so does 96, so does 24; it's easily changeable and I have no strong preference myself. Mathglot (talk) 10:00, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

:::::: If my voice is the only voice with an opinion: start with 72 and change it if somebody asks for it. Not the other way round, partly because doing it that way in effect willfully ignores suggestions you are getting now. Why can't suggestions now hold equal weight to those that you (probably won't) get later? Thanks CapnZapp (talk) 14:04, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

:::::::Any multiple of 24 hours should definitely be presented as X days; this is significantly more likely to be the intention than hours per se. Odd multiples of 12 hours should generally be presented as X.5 days, though maybe 12h or 36h can be left as exceptions. If someone has some weird value like 20 or 50 hours then maybe show it as hours. –jacobolus (t) 22:32, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Related to this, there is one nugget of information you can configure the archive bots with, but wasn't possible to convey through the templates:

If you tell the bots to not archive until, say, 2 sections are eligible, then its possible for users to not understand why the bot isn't archiving.

Say there are 5 talk sections. All are older than the number of days specified. But the settings say "keep at least four sections and only archive two or more sections at a time." This means no archiving is done for now, since you need a sixth new talk discussion in order to archive two of the stale discussions and still leave four on the page.

(PS. Configuring the bot to keep 4 sections is very useful since the table of content is per default only generated on pages with four sections. Configuring the bot to only archive two sections at a time is relatively useful to avoid cluttering the history page with lots of archival edits, which can come across as the bot being "too aggressive" in its cleaning)

Proposal: tweak this new wondrous automatic display of the actual bot settings to also tell the user if the bot will only archive two or more sections at a time. Specifically when {{para|minthreadstoarchive|2}} (or more). Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 12:09, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

:{{para|minthreadstoarchive}} is currently displayed in the tooltip (along with the specific bot that does the archiving). It's not ideal, but when we designed the merge, keeping the display very concise was a top concern (for good reason, given the tendency for talk page banner bloat), so that's what we went with. Thinking in terms of a talk page user, I can see why it might be useful to know the auto-archiving period, but it's harder to envision reasons why it would be helpful to know the minthreadstoarchive or the specific bot that does the archiving. Sdkb ^talk 20:30, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

: Capn, it would be a fairly easy upgrade to add what you are suggesting, but as Sdkb points out, it's already there in the tooltip, and I think the trade-off design of lean-and-mean visible part, and the rest of it in a tooltip was a good decision. Other than tooltips are not easily visible from mobile, not sure if there are other accessibility issues with tooltips; it had occurred to me that along with this change one might add alt text for screen readers, but I didn't want to overload the proposal, at least initially, with too much stuff. But it's something to consider, moving forward. Mathglot (talk) 21:31, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

: Cap'n, since you mentioned wondrous—I also think it's pretty cool—I wanted to spread the credit where it's due. While in theory this could have been implemented earlier through use of a set of complex regular expressions, that would've been difficult to develop, test, and maintain, and might've been fragile. What really made the archival config auto-detection feasible here was the upgrade to Module:Template parameter value developed by {{u|Aidan9382}}, which in turn enabled construction of {{tl|HasTemplate}}. There is still some regex code in the archive bot parser here, but it's straightforward and not the tangled mess it would've been had we not had access to this upgrade. While the Module upgrade was in progress, I didn't even imagine it being used here (had something else in mind) but after it was done, a little light turned on and I realized it was now possible, and not even difficult, to add the config detection and parsing. So that led in a pretty direct line to the changes here. I think the Module upgrade will have beneficial knock-on effects elsewhere, so spread a little love in Aidan's direction. Sdkb will recognize one opportunity in the somewhat clunky WikiProject detection in {{tl|find sources}} for domain selection, and I predict others will come to light. Mathglot (talk) 22:18, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

:: Okay at first User:Sdkb (and User:Mathglot), I thought you meant this functionality had been recently added. But looking at an example page Talk:Gravity (2013 film) I don't see it. The tooltip states "Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by lowercase sigmabot III after 120 days of inactivity when more than 5 threads are present." There is no mention the bot will archive only when more than 1 thread is eligible; for this page, the param is set to {{para|minthreadstoarchive|2}} So a reader can be left completely bewildered and not understand why the bot "isn't working" when it isn't archiving the oldest section once a sixth discussion is started, when in fact, it IS working: to keep down the number of archival edits; it will only step in once a seventh discussion is started, if it can then archive two discussions in one sweep. It's just the information that is inadequate. This is the same as when the talk header template first was reworked - support for every param except {{para|minthreadstoarchive}}. Unless there's something strange going on and I don't see what you guys are seeing? (I'm using legacy Vector if that matters) Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 09:27, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

::: I see what you are saying, and all I can say is, the proposal that is the object of this discussion was, at least at first anyway, solely about replicating existing wording from whatever the template was doing before, and just making sure to get accurate values directly from the config and not from template parameters which often go out of sync. If the bot notice didn't say anything about minthreadstoarchive before, then it won't say anything about it after the change, either. I see your point about reader confusion, and for whatever reason, there hasn't been a decision to address that in the bot notice previously, so we aren't addressing it either, in order to stick to previous behavior as much as possible.

::: My suggestion would be simply to start a new top-level discussion proposing your change. Then, regardless whether the bot config-detection function is kept or not kept, your proposal about minthreadstoarchive would stand on its own and could succeed independently. Or, you could just try a bold change and see if it sticks. That's my take; I wonder what Sdkb will say about this. Mathglot (talk) 09:50, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

::::Given that this is a TE-protected template with 500k+ transclusions, I wouldn't recommend bold editing. I'd be interested to see a concrete proposal (i.e. a mockup of the design you'd like) for displaying {{para|minthreadstoarchive}}, but as I said above, I'll be skeptical of its value (and more so the more prominent the display). Sdkb ^talk 16:29, 2 March 2024 (UTC)

{{od}}

You are claiming {{para|minthreadstoarchive}} is currently displayed in the tooltip. I don't see it. I am not asking for this parameter to appear in the template. Just the tooltip text. I don't see why this could be controversial or why I need to start a new discussion or create a mockup? (Unless you mean simple wording along the lines of, still using Gravity as my example; "Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by lowercase sigmabot III after 120 days of inactivity when more than 5 threads are present if more than 1 thread is eligible for archiving.") I'm simply thinking that since you're already editing the relevant code and you are the editors with the relevant knowledge (if you can extract the other params you can extract this one), why not suggest fixing this once and for all... CapnZapp (talk) 16:26, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

:@CapnZapp, if you go to a page like Talk:Algeria and hover your cursor over the text that says "Auto-archiving period", do you see the tooltip that reads {{tq|Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III after 90 days of inactivity when more than 4 threads are present}}? That's what we're referring to. Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 00:50, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

: Interesting; regarding Gravity: when I hover over Talk:Gravity's bot notice, I see it mentioning 365 days of inactivity and 10 threads; is that not what you see? The config hasn't been edited since January 10, but it was 180/none before that. Did you mean a different page? Mathglot (talk) 04:47, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::I think CapnZapp is referring to a completely different thing than Mathglot and Sdkb here. There are two different parameters that relate to a number of threads – one (the one currently displayed) is for the number of threads which have to remain on the page after archiving (for example, if this parameter was 2 and there were 5 threads on the page, all of them old enough to archive, only 3 threads would be archived). The other one, which I think CapnZapp is referring to, is for the minimum number of threads that are allowed to be archived with a single edit by the bot (as another example, if that parameter was 2 and there was exactly one thread old enough to archive, the bot would not archive it at all, but once there were 2 or more eligible threads the bot would archive them all). Tollens (talk) 10:07, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::: Thanks for that clarification. Yes, agreed; but if the previous incarnation did not address that, should we be doing so? On the + side, strike while the iron is hot; on the - side, just trying to reproduce the original bot notice, which presumably had consensus previously (even if silent), without any significant changes, but more accurately. To the extent that a proposal represents a change to previous behavior, is this thread the right place to deal with it? I can see both views, but I wonder, given the visibility of the template, if additional changes to a highly visible template would require additional consensus? I don't know the answer to that question. Mathglot (talk) 10:39, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::: Sdkb I see it. I also see that the bot instructions for that particular revision has no {{para|minthreadstoarchive}} parameter set. CapnZapp (talk) 16:03, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::: Tollens I am indeed referring to {{para|minthreadstoarchive}} and not merely {{para|minthreadsleft}} which Talk header have had support for a while now. I think I have been consistently using minthreadstoarchive in my request but feel free to point out if I have accidentally mentioned a different parameter. CapnZapp (talk) 16:07, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::::I agree that you've been using the correct parameter name – just trying to clear up the apparent confusion. Tollens (talk) 17:37, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::::: So, if it uses both, how would you word that? Mathglot (talk) 20:33, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::::::I think that was what CapnZapp meant by their example: {{tq|"Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by lowercase sigmabot III after 120 days of inactivity when more than 5 threads are present if more than 1 thread is eligible for archiving."}} (emphasis mine). Tollens (talk) 21:02, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::: Mathglot: seeing that there's even confusion about which parameter we're discussing let me first ask you -respectfully- to make absolutely certain you understand the request I am making (instead of the request you might think I am making). To be clear, I am not asking for any visual change of the talk header template (and related templates). Only a more informative tooltip. Your caution to me suggests you might still think I'm asking for a more intrusive change than I am actually asking for. I honestly don't feel I need to make mockups - the template's appearance will remain unchanged. I honestly don't see why we would need a whole new round of consensus - again, it's only the tooltip that in a minority of cases would convey a little bit more information. Using Gravity movie as my example, if a page's bot instructions contain {{para|minthreadstoarchive|2}} I would like the tooltip to say something along the lines of "...if more than 1 thread is eligible for archiving". As stated previously! {{pb}} I cannot do more than make sure I am using the right parameter name. I cannot help if people read that as referring to other parameters? Again, if y'all have any advice on how I can be more clear please advise - I thought I was crystal clear but apparently not so? CapnZapp (talk) 16:22, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::::I'd support just making this change. I don't think anyone will be upset by (or, for that matter, notice) a change that's only inside a tooltip. Tollens (talk) 17:39, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::::Yes, they are very similarly named, and I think I got confused. Especially if it's just inside the Tooltip, I agree with Tollens that probably hardly anybody will even notice. Mathglot (talk) 20:31, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

::::: Parsing is working in the subtemplate sandbox; next is further testing and moving the subtemplate sandbox to live, deciding what wording you want, then we have to add the wording to the Talk header sandbox, add new test cases for it, and then move the new TPH sandbox to live. After that, similar for Template:Archives: new wording (not a tooltip), then sandbox and test it, and release to live. Both templates use the same parser. The blocking dependency now is deciding on the wording for Template:Talk header, presumably in the tooltip. Mathglot (talk) 02:35, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

::::::I'd support CapnZapp's suggested "if more than X thread(s) is/are eligible for archiving" appended to the end of the existing tooltip. Tollens (talk) 02:58, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

::::::: How about: "If X or more threads are eligible for archiving"; that will save having to add code for verb number agreement. Also, I think we should only generate it when X >= 2. When X=1, adding the phrase or not adding it describe identical constraints, so the X=1 case doesn't need to be shown, and it might even make it worse as viewers would probably have to pause and try to parse out what it means. Mathglot (talk) 05:38, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

::::::::Oh, right, of course – I forgot that archiving was when there were ≥ the number specified in the parameter, not >. Your wording looks good to me. Tollens (talk) 06:10, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

::::::::: Only saying something when {{para|minthreadstoarchive|2}} (or more) was part of my original proposal, so, yeah. CapnZapp (talk) 17:31, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

:::::I would strongly recommend suppressing min threads to archive, even inside a tooltip. It's not reader-relevant information, even for the most pedantically config-obsessed readers. The only reason this parameter exists is to reduce the amount of archive-bot watchlist noise, and people only need to care about this parameter if a miconfiguration is causing some problem, either (a) if the bot is doing an excessive amount of archive edits which are distracting people by spamming their watchlists or (b) if the bot isn't archiving old threads for too long because the threshhold is too high. In either case it only comes up when someone is having a problem with it. It's otherwise unnecessary to know or care about the setting of this parameter. –jacobolus (t) 07:15, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

::::::The same is true (perhaps more so, even) of the specific bot doing the archiving. I don't see why we would not include all available information in a tooltip which will only be viewed by people wanting more information. It isn't as if it's cluttering up the page. Tollens (talk) 07:25, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

:::::::Leaving out the bot name also seems beneficial, but at least doesn't require coming up with the kinds of confusing phrases proposed above for min threads to archive. –jacobolus (t) 08:03, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

::::::::Then what do you intend to leave in the tooltip? I just don't see the harm in providing more information in a tooltip, even if I were to assume that nobody cares, which I don't necessarily think is true. Tollens (talk) 08:04, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

:::::::::I don't really care about the tooltip (getting the dates human readable is more important), but it seems substantially unnecessary overall. Try to remain focused to the extent possible on making changes which concretely benefit readers and cutting out every bit of extraneous stuff on highly used templates which doesn't directly benefit readers, rather than on just adding as many things as possible just for the sake of having more things. In aggregate the latter ends up being actively harmful. –jacobolus (t) 08:20, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

:::::::::: It isn't clear to me what it is you want; on the one hand, you say you don't care about the tooltip, but then you say it's unnecessary and we should cut extraneous stuff, and that it's harmful. In this or any template, of course we want to benefit readers, and it's hard to see how a tooltip is harmful to anybody: certainly not to the 60% of our users who are mobile and never see it, or to the other 40% who must actively move their mouse over it in order to activate the pop-up text. Who's getting harmed here? Finally, the tooltip has a few years longevity without objection, so I don't think its going away without a clear consensus to remove which would likely require a specific proposal in a new section and an Rfc. Mathglot (talk) 15:27, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

:::::::::::My point is that anyone adding material to widely viewed templates should try to be careful about what they add to make sure that it has significant value, because every additional bit of extra material that might benefit a few people also imposes a cost (distraction, confusion, etc.) on a large number of others. The bias should be toward being conservative, including fewer features, using less space, etc.

:::::::::::Putting stuff in a tooltip is significantly better than putting it elsewhere, but even within the tooltip try to consider whether each piece of information is really necessary, because the more information you cram in there, the harder it is to make sense of any particular piece. Try to put yourself in the position of a talk page reader. Do you really care about the "min threads to archive" setting on talk pages you visit? How often? How much of a burden is it to just look at the source if you do? –jacobolus (t) 15:48, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

:::::::::::: Generally I agree with your philosophy of parsimony, but I don't care that much what is or isn't in the tooltip, as long as what is there is accurate, and under the previous design, often it was not, which is how this all got started. That said, I do mouse over the tooltip and like seeing the age and units, which I know I can rely on now as accurate with the latest changes to the template. The other bits of tooltip info don't bother me personally, and I don't care if they stay or go, but that's not up to me. Mathglot (talk) 16:29, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

This is developed and now in test mode. I tweaked the wording slightly which seemed to flow better. Here's a summary of status and pages involved:

• Functionality – description of requested change (in this section, above)
• Archive bot config parser sandbox – now parses minarchthreads/minthreadstoarchive
• Template:Talk header/sandbox – points to parser sandbox, and has new tooltip code added for minarchthreads/minthreadstoarchive
• Testcases, tab 4 – pre-existing and new tests for archiving notice functionality
• test cases for Talk pages having a Miszabot config – no testcases yet; t.b.a.
• test cases for Talk pages having a Cluebot config – (twelve tests in place, passing).

More eyeballs and more tests are needed; this is needless to say a highly visible template and we need to test the new functionality, as well as regression to ensure nothing is broken before going live. I need to set this aside for a while, so any help appreciated. Add tests directly to the test page {{tl|Talk header/testcases4}}, and please examine or run regression tests on the first three testcase pages as well; please note what works/doesn't below. Doc on page testcases4 is still thin; feel free to adjust as needed, and if there is anything inscrutable, please lmk. Mathglot (talk) 02:10, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

:Just added the tests on tab 4 for talk pages with a Miszabot config, and they all seem to be passing with the version in the sandbox. Looking through tabs 1 and 3, everything appears fine (tab 2 is now completely redundant and could/should probably be deleted). The one thing I did notice that is not really as expected is that when the number of threads to keep on the page is 1, the grammar is wrong (see Talk:Conspiracy theory), and when it's 0, there shouldn't be a message at all but there is (see Talk:Cold fusion) – I should be able to fix both pretty easily. Tollens (talk) 01:14, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

::That fix is now done. Tollens (talk) 01:26, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

::: Edit-conflicted with you, so my test is invalid as I don't know if it took place after your fix, but the first part of the message was this:

::: Oh, that's great; thanks for the testcases update, glad they worked. As far as minthreads and the two Talk pages, that could mean the legacy code was doing that, as the minthreads stuff is old code and was not changed for this upgrade (although the conditional logic around it was). Looking at legacy rev. 1193759647‎, there is no adjustment for sing/plural; not sure if it handled the number of threads correctly or not at that point. But I am not seeing what you do: in both test methods, I see these results for Cold fusion:

:::* CF live: {{xt!|Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by lowercase sigmabot III after 180 days of inactivity when more than 0 threads are present.}}

:::* CF sbox: {{xt|Discussions with timestamps are automatically archived by lowercase sigmabot III after 180 days of inactivity.}}

::: Post-ec again: that sandbox test of mine could've been run after your fix, so that is meaningless; but the live test showed that problem before; anyway, good that you've fixed that. I've maybe missed something from your message, as I feel I have two many balls in the air; did I? Mathglot (talk) 01:51, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

::::If that was the result you got, you definitely ran that test after it was fixed in the sandbox, it wouldn't have worked before this change. It was certainly the old version that was broken, I agree nothing that's been done related to this changed it. I don't think you've missed anything. Tollens (talk) 01:58, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

{{od|::::}}

Was just poking around your new test cases, and found a new one at Talk:Hurricane Florence with minthreadstoarchive=7. It doesn't test the new code path, because the config defines the archive names as using the date style, and {{tl|Talk header}} doesn't display anything for that case. But, we still have access to all the config params and if we wanted, we *could* still display the bot notice in that case, maybe even in plain text not as a tooltip, as a way for Talk header to display *something* even if it can't show the links. For that matter, it wouldn't be that hard to reconstitute the actual archive names based on parsing the {{para|Archive}} param, but this is sounding more and more like a new proposal and off-topic with what we are testing here, so I think I'll drop this for now. I just wanted to get that out there, before I forgot about it, so we can take it up again if we want later after the dust has settled on current stuff. Mathglot (talk) 02:15, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Just to chime in regarding the cutoff for rounding ClueBot: it appears the code is using 24 hours. Only User:Novem Linguae suggested this. I have suggested 72 hours instead. Nobody has objected, but also, your response so far has been "it's incredibly easy to change it to any figure that comes out of consensus here" which is nice, but also kind of ignores my message. How about doing that which is so incredibly easy, and setting the number to 72 before finalizing testing, and then waiting for consensus to change it? CapnZapp (talk) 21:27, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Note: the test code in the sandbox for adding this functionality has been removed in order to attend to a more important issue (see {{slink||Broken case}} below)^[archived]. The change will need to be re-added and retested in the sandbox. before moving ahead. Mathglot (talk) 06:15, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

While updating Template:Setup auto archiving and Template:Setup cluebot archiving to not include the recently deprecated parameters in their prefill, I noticed that unknown parameters do not cause talk pages to be added to :Category:Pages using Talk header with unknown parameters even though that's what it seems like that category is for. The use of {{tl|Main other}} in that section causes only article-space pages to be categorized, but that doesn't make sense to me given that this template shouldn't ever be in article space in the first place. Perhaps Gonnym, who introduced the tracking category, can clarify the intent – perhaps just a mistake. It looks like {{tl|Talkspace detect}} could be used to figure out which talkspace the template is used in, if that's what's desired. I am really not sure what to do here, though – there are probably a very large number of these unknown parameters given that they haven't been getting tracked. Tollens (talk) 05:53, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

:Thanks. Now fixed. Was possibly a copy/paste error on my end. Gonnym (talk) 11:13, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

On the Japanese Wikipedia, the talk header template has a message reminding people to sign their comments with four tildes and that a signature with the date and time will automatically populate. We remind people on this Wikipedia to sign with four tildes, but it is not as prominent as in the Japanese Wikipedia. I suggest we follow the Japanese Wikipedia's example and include a message to remind users to sign with four tildes, and word it as, "Sign with four tildes (~~~~). A signature with the date and time will populate." Z. Patterson (talk) 20:07, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

:The Reply tool automatically signs comments, and given that it is what users are pushed toward this seems unnecessary, especially coupled with the fact that unsigned comments are signed by a bot if a new user manages to. This template did at one point include this guidance but it was removed, quite reasonably in my opinion. The more text is visible, the less likely any of it will be read. Tollens (talk) 07:24, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

This parameter is still not discussed by the popup message explaining why/why not a page gets archived.

If | minthreadstoarchive = 2 for instance, then an editor needs to read the actual code (=editing the page) to understand why the archive bot isn't running. (It is because even though a section is clearly ripe for archiving, there is only one section to archive, and the parameter tells the bot to hold off archiving until it can archive 2 or more sections in a single go).

Either we agree the bot's behavior should be explained by what we tell talk page readers, or we agree this isn't necessary.

In the first case, the info that the bot won't act until more talk sections have expired needs to be added somehow. In the second, why not simply remove all info related to the bot's parameters? CapnZapp (talk) 14:27, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

:@CapnZapp, we could try adding it to the tooltip somehow. But I'm also not losing sleep at night over it just not being displayed, and I'd oppose any sort of display more prominent than inclusion in the tooltip. Sdkb ^talk 14:54, 20 May 2025 (UTC)