Template talk:InactiveUserpage

In March, the inactive date threshold was changed from August 2018 to January 2020 without a discussion as far as I can tell; at the time of that edit, that would be an inactive period of only two months. Instead of specifying a specific date, I suggest changing the threshold to no activity in the past year, which is the same inactivity period that we have for demoting inactive admins. –Sonicwave ^talk 19:59, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

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 Agree, change it to September 20th, 2019.---Humiebee ^{Discuss anything with me Look at my edits} 20:01, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Definitely 👁 Image
 Support. This would be more accurate (if we keep updating the date, the actual time frame continuously increases and decreases) and also obviously eliminates the need to continuously edit the template. --Madminecrafter12 ^{(Talk to me | View what I've done)} 21:22, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

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 Agree with changing it to just one year. If you want a specific date: {{#time: F j, Y | -1 year}} (June 29, 2025).  Nixinova   T   C   21:28, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

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 Comment oh---Humiebee ^{Discuss anything with me Look at my edits} 22:16, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

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 Strong Support, arbitrary dates are the worst way to indicate inactivity. FVbico (talk) 21:29, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

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 Done, there was complete support by 3 admins.---Humiebee ^{Discuss anything with me Look at my edits} 22:19, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

To be honest, I've never really liked the practice of blanking user pages. Instead of getting interesting or useful information about past wiki users you now get a giant red warning box, and people are probably very unlikely to go into the history to see the actual user page. I'm not really sure what to do with this template and the 1694 user pages that it's used on, but I've been thinking about superseding it with a different template that just explains that some content has been removed and linking to the last good revision, but leaves non-problematic parts of the page intact, especially basic information about the user. –Sonicwave ^talk 06:03, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

@Sonicwave I'd 👁 Image
 Support a replacement template with your proposed one. As for what to do with this template after replacement, what do you think about leaving this up for those 1694 pages but specifying somewhere in the documentation that it's deprecated by a new template? ManyOursOfFun (talk) 10:06, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we need to go ham on replacing all existing usages either, but I'll probably change a few that I happen to come across, and (assuming this gets consensus) would definitely deprecate future usages. –Sonicwave ^talk 04:40, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

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 Support phasing out blanking user pages. I have to wonder though, how necessary is altering user pages in the first place? How much damage are redlinks really doing? - Harristic | Talk 👁 DungeonsEntitySprite penguin-onesie.png: Sprite image for penguin-onesie in Minecraft
17:36, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

Special:WantedPages lists all deleted pages that have links to them, so removing redlinks from user pages cleans that up a bit. You can filter each Special:WhatLinksHere page by namespace, but that's not ideal because you can't exclude namespaces nor select multiple, and there are several namespaces in which red links are almost always undesirable. However, I do agree that blanking user pages isn't a great solution. --Madminecrafter12 (talk) 02:53, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

User pages should not be blanked at all, especially by regular users. I really see no benefits in doing that, even if the user page is full of red links or broken templates. Of course administrators should still intervene in case of inappropriate content and so on.--Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 18:30, 4 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree, nobody has any business blanking anyone else's page. At most, we could create an "inactive editor" tag and put that on a page instead.

It would be great if we could get an auto-archive bot like Wikipedia has, to automatically archive old talk page discussions. This has proven to be incredibly useful on all talk pages, user talk, article talk, any-namespace-talk. Inactive users with auto-archive have their talk pages archived eventually except for the last couple of comments (the archiver doesn't completely blank a page unless you set it that way on your talk page). ~Anachronist (talk) 16:52, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Support only if any registered user are allowed to un-link redlinks (removing links to dead pages/files/templates/categories), switch spritenames to currently used sprites, or comment/code-block out deprecated scripts. Whatever clears user pages from maintainance categories. Delvin4519 (talk) 14:25, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't see an issue with that, or even completely removing/commenting out broken sections such as old drafts, as long as some effort is made to preserve information about that user. While I think we're a lot more aggressive with "fixing" other people's user pages than is generally expected on most wikis, my main issue is with the indiscriminate and total blanking of them.

I think I'll start applying this now, starting with User:Orthotope (the page that prompted me to create the discussion and can serve as an example). I just noticed {{blanked for redlinks}}, which I've moved to {{blanked page}} and repurposed since it's not used on many pages. –Sonicwave ^talk 05:01, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

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 Strong support of all above suggestions. I like reading people's user pages, but there's all too many ones that are blanked. I do agree that broken links and templates should be cleaned up, though. Nerdyguy2000 (talk) 22:30, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

What about, like, in the case of redlinks, we just make them not a link? Example: if the nether page was deleted (not that it will be any time soon), then we just do: Nether --> Nether. Basically just remove the brackets around them. -~- Nerdyguy2000   talk   edits 22:05, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

See Template:Direct link. 👁 Image
Wilf233_zhMCW（论·功） 04:57, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

A better idea is to add Template:Inactive to the top of userpages instead of replacing the userpage with a red box. 👁 Image
(talk|contributions) 18:48, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

But what if there's problematic links and such? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  00:40, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

I meant for inactive only users, not users with broken links. 👁 Image
(talk|contributions) 04:29, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

In that case, it's a good idea. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  13:46, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

How to define inactive? It is impolite to edit other's user page without permission unless there are lots of broken links which can cause maintenance issue. 👁 Image
Wilf233_zhMCW（论·功） 15:56, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

How about 6 months without any log actions? 👁 Image
(talk|contributions) 17:05, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Maybe. That sounds fair to me. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  23:38, 11 September 2024 (UTC)