Template:Archives/doc

— Adds a box containing links to archived discussions. It will automatically detect archives by default.

Parameters

 * archivelist
 * Specifies a subpage containing the archive list. See "Archive list" below.


 * index
 * Adds an "Index" link to the box title, to the specified subpage, which should be a subject index to all archived discussions. HBC Archive Indexerbot can automatically generate such indexes.


 * small=yes
 * This option causes the archive box to take on the same color scheme as other talk page templates, and to have a slightly smaller size.


 * auto=
 * Specifies the format of the auto-generated archive list. See "Archive list" below.  If unspecified, the default is "long"; however any other word (such as "yes") will result in "short".

Archive list
By default (with no explicit parameters), the archive list presented in the box is determined automatically. If a subpage called " " exists, it will be used as the central content of the box (for an example, see Talk:Evolution, which draws from Talk:Evolution/archivelist).

If no archivelist subpage is detected, numbered archive subpages will be listed in long format. Such pages must be named as "/Archive #". Other naming styles will not be detected. If no subpages are found, the archivebox will contain only the "About" and "Edit" links, with the Edit link targeted at " " (which can then be used to begin manually populating the list, if desired).

If the " " parameter is explicitly specified, the "Edit" link is removed. The " " auto format (the default) indicates "Archive 1", "Archive 2", and so on. The " " auto format indicates only the archive number. See examples below.

If you specify an archive list explicitly, the name of the subpage is changed, but otherwise, the behavior is the same.

Additional notes
The " " and " " parameters are not intended to be used together. (Doing so removes the edit link, but will still use the specified archive list page if it exists.)

The auto-generated archive list requires subpages to use the common naming convention. That is, "./Archive 1", "./Archive 2", and so on. The letter "A" must be capitalized, there must be a single space between the word "Archive" and the number, and there must be no leading zeros. If archive subpages do not conform to this convention, they can be renamed to conform, or a manual list can be maintained.

Specifying " " with any right-hand-side value other than " " results in the short-format list; the use of " " as the value just makes things more obvious to others.

The short and long auto lists are generated by archive list and archive list long, respectively. They are limited to a maximum of 100 and 36 subpages, respectively. Beyond those limits, additional subpages will not be listed. In such cases, a manually generated archive list subpage would need to be created and maintained.