User:Werdnabot/Archiver/Howto

How to set a talk page up for automatic archival

To set up your User talk page for automatic archival by Werdnabot, you need to add, to the top of your user talk page, the following code: {{subst:User:Werdnabot/Archiver/Template|age=(age)|target=(target)|dounreplied=(dounreplied)}}, where:

(age) is the number of days a section must have no signed comments before it becomes eligible for archival.
(target) is the fully-qualified name of the page to archive to. For example, my user talk page archives to User talk:Werdna648/Archive/Archive 03, and I specify this as the parameter. {{CURRENTMONTHABBREV}} expands to the same abbreviation that it would expand to in wikitext, i.e. Nov.
(dounreplied), if any value is given, tells Werdnabot to archive sections with one or more signed comments, as different from the default behaviour of only archiving sections with two or more signed comments.

Points to remember:

Werdnabot reads this information by reading the wikitext of the page. Therefore, you must subst the template, and include it directly into the wikitext of the page that you want archived.
Werdnabot will run an archival job every six hours, at 02:00 UTC, 08:00 UTC, 14:00 UTC, and 20:00 UTC.
Only signed comments will be archived by Werdnabot.
You can view the output of Werdnabot's archival job at https://www.epstone.net/WPA-output.txt.
Due to technical difficulties, Werdnabot may not run archival jobs all the time.
You can view the log of all Werdnabot actions at User:Werdna648/Werdnabot/Log.
If you have your user talk page archived by Werdnabot, you will receive a "new messages" prompt after Werdnabot archives your User talk page.
I am always contactable on my talk page for any problems to do with Werdnabot's archival functionality.

— Werdna talk criticism 08:59, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Tricks

Adding  to a section will prevent it from being archived.
Adding  to a section will force it to be archived on the next pass.

When specifying the archive sub-page, only a subset of m:Magic words work. They are:

!month
{{currentmonthabbrev}}
{{currentmonth}}
{{currentmonthname}}
{{currentyear}}
{{currentweek}}

Note also that it has to be a sub-page now...you can't just have it go anywhere (anymore.)