Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1251315-20150325130621/@comment-4984687-20150326013531

AIdmeri wrote: My point is a person should be able to decide when to archive. You're talking about the amount of messages that should be on a single archive page. If the community came up with a standard amount of messages to be on a single archive, then there should be something in that standard that allows us to archive when we want, and still abide by the "how many messages until the next archive can be created" rule. If I were to archive my page today, and a few months down the road I get 3 more messages, I should be free to archive that along with my additional messages in my first archive, instead of creating a new one. Get it? The main purpose archives serve is to shift retired messages so that a talk page doesn't get clogged up with messages. With 50+, it gets harder to look through, but with only around 3 messages it is extremely easy to navigate through. If someone decides to make 20 archives with 3 messages each, it instead clogs up the number of archives. That many archives with that low amount of messages is unbalanced.

Archiving talk pages doesn't rely on when the messages were posted; I have 3 years worth of messages in my first archive, amounting to a total of 36. I didn't archive my talk page because the new year came along, I archived it because it was getting long and if it went to a higher number it would become hard to navigate through.