How does this affect existing talk pages, were this to be rolled out? (Talk, talk archives, etc)
Topic on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2
They will be archived and saved. They will not be parsed into Flow topics and boards (this would be exceptionally difficult to do).
This will be disruptive. The vast majority of talk pages is very low volume. The few comments they assembled over the years represent a substantial knowledge base. This will effectively archived wholesale.
How is that any different from the substantial knowledge base already archived in higher-volume pages?
As always, if you're interested in something in the archives, you could re-post it. All you would need to do is say something like "I think this person made a good point eight years ago:" and copy it over.
I don't think "higher-volume pages" were what the IP editor had in mind.
Considering article talk pages, they are one of the most important sources to verify validity of articles for me. If there were any controversial statements in the past, talk pages allow me to quickly identify those and be cautious about those parts of the article.
Talk pages of articles are also a quick way to get an overview of an articles history. What was changed for what reasons? What was missing and what was left out on purpose?
Archiving is actually bad in that this information is more or less lost (or would you dig into archives when quickly scanning an article?). Splitting the old and the new talk page is some sort of history split.
I admit that I can't think of a workable solution of this problem though with the current design of Flow you're intending. And I doubt you liked the design proposals I could think of which would not exhibit these problems...
Each archived conversation could be stored in a Flow page under the "metadata" or scratchpad section, with and empty "new-storage" Flow threads section.
> All you would need to do is say something like "I think this person made a good point eight years ago:" and copy it over.
That would be quite difficult in cases where the old discussion used some form of wikitext that is not supported by Flow...
Ack. In addition it does not address the problem, that archived discussions are out of sight. There is a reason why old low volume talk pages are not automatically archived.