The recently released Archiving Plugin 2.1.0 supports the long awaited "archived" space status mentioned by Bill, to remove archived pages from search results, activity streams and dashboards.
Get fully automatic archiving for your Confluence pages:

• detect and monitor expired content
• notify the users responsible for the expired content
• clean up the fresh content by moving the expired content to hidden archive spaces
• and more, see: http://www.midori.hu/products/confluence-archiving-plugin/documentation/

This screenshot tells a lot: http://www.midori.hu/images/products/carch/configuration-space.png
The plugin at Marketplace: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/123

Get the plugin via the Universal Plugin Manager built in to Confluence (or download from https://marketplace.atlassian.com/123)

this will be in Confluence 4.3 which will be available shortly.

exciting update: Archiving Plugin version 2.0.0 has been released some days ago. this version implements the feature request discussed here! you can now hide archive spaces.

(the plugin does it by removing "read" access for everyone, but Confluence admins. this is possible in any Confluence version, so it does not rely on the "archive space" feature that will be introduced only in Confluence 3.4.)

there is a lot more improvements in this release, check the list, read the docs or get the plugin via UPM.

Agreed. There is a plugin to archive specific pages https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/123, but being able to archive an entire space in the same fashion would be quite useful!

hi lukas,

extending the plugin to cover whole spaces wolud be great. so we can manage projects in spaces and archive them when finished

Greg, thanks for your comments.

#1 seems easy to implement
#2 and #3, I have to investigate. I want to refrain as much as possible from touching core functionality as this will probably have to be redone for each and every version of confluence.

Our need is around retiring sites. We need a way to move a site to an "archive" location or status which in turn will remove the space from the dashboard.

Hi all

I am the author of the Archiving Plugin ( https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/wiki/display/CARCH/Confluence+Archiving+Plugin ). On a page level, this plugin solves most archiving issues.

I am thinking about extending the plugin to cover whole spaces. Thus, I would be keen to learn your requirements! Please feel free to comment this thread.

A quick fix would be to restrict access to admin user for archived spaces, as this would solve most problems from the user's perspective. (Search, Space list etc.) What do you think?

Wow 4 years old and this still hasn't been addressed. My users are starting to complain that the search function is useless because of all the old Archive stuff that shows up in the results. We have to keep it in our wiki for historical/business reasons, so there's no way to exclude it from search.. Makes search pretty useless

+1 for integrating the Confluence Archiving Plugin into Confluence's core offering. But one thing I don't like about it, is creating a second "Archive Space" at the Dashboard level that stores the legacy pages. Would prefer that each space have its own "Archive" tab that only the Space Admin can see and manage. That keeps things cleaner and scales better.

Because this feature does not exist, we're converting spaces to PDF then DELETING them, just to keep them out of search. Ugh!
See also the related need http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-996 to trim excess page history.

Absolutely need archiving ability. Agree: need it for spaces, as well as for pages. And the ability to archive people would be amazing. I don't want to delete content, but it's confusing for our team when old campaigns (we use it for all information corporate wide, I'm in marketing and use it to push out info to the sales team) are still up there and I have to put big warning signs on each page hoping that the sales team won't use the information. Sigh. Need archive. Desperately.

I like this idea and just added my vote. However, I'll point out that the way this feature is described above assumes a very space-oriented usage pattern. In my company, we try to minimize the number of spaces and maximize the stability and longevity of spaces, and therefore I'd like to see page- and page-family-oriented usage patterns covered as well. The Archiving Plugin design has it covered; it would be great to work its features into the core of Confluence.

One thing that has worked is to create the wikiarchive user. As administrator you can manage and edit users spaces as needed. Create the home page for this user. Move the spaces to the users space choosing the wikiarchive users home page as the new home page. Use view in hierarchy if needed to reorder pages and place a link on the home page for each group of pages. It seems to work great. another thing you can do is to allow key individuals access so for those people these pages will still show up in search when needed. Thoughts/suggestions?

Perhaps the Archiving Plugin offers some functionality you are after.

Cheers

Matt

We agree on the usefulness of this feature request, however it is a large amount of work that would take up most of a release. We will review our feature priorities and assess whether we can fit this feature in within 2009-2010.

If you're interested to know how we decide on which features to implement, please read this:
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+and+Improvements

I am looking for funcionality to exclude a space from global search.

I would also just like to second this request and say that we also need the ability to archive a space with one simple operation such that it is no longer searchable or editable.

However, I also see the possibility of having a single operation in the administrator's panel to archive the entire confluence (all spaces) while you're at it, for a temporarily read-only confluence instance (maybe for the backup/standby instance while the production copy is being upgraded, for example). This can, of course, be undone. Perhaps a checkbox list to do mass archival in the control panel would be a possible implementation?

People hate to throw stuff away... but we've got a lot of moldy spaces/pages.

Clearly this isn't an easy issue to resolve to make everyone happy.

Case in point, there are some "old" pages that haven't been modified in months – but they are still relevant. The reason they haven't been changed is that they are more stable information than some of the more volatile and active content.

As an Administrator – I do want the ability to archive an entire space easily, and let people get access but only by going into "dig into the archives" mode (whatever that means).

And on a page-by-page basis, perhaps there could be daily process that looks for an "archive" label on a page. If that exists, the page would be moved from the "active" Search Index into the "Archives", and it would display in Browse Space only if a "show archived pages" option is selected.

Not saying that would work, just thinking out loud.

Primary need – bulk archive an entire space.

-T

I am interested in this feature. I would like to have the ability to take it offline completely and restore it back to the same or selected location, or have an online achive that are inactive (hidden from general viewing or in a separate space but still knows where it will go back to when I reactivate it). The viewable archive should not be editable by default or have the security set to editable or not.

I am very interested in this feature too. Would love to see it finished! Is it still being worked upon?

Also, would this plugin allow archiving a space to let's say html pages that can be saved on cd?

This would certainly help resolve the inability to delete users who have authored content, if we could archive old users that would be great. It would also give us a lot more flexibility in having a space per project which is really ideal, but very cumbersome under the current long-term workflow.

We have the general issue of wanting to clean up old content. Sometimes deletes are ok, but other times we want to take the pages out of search results and/or move them to an archive space, which would hopefully not be searchable. Here's a comment from a senior exec who kind of likes the wiki, but is getting frustrated at all the outdated stuff. His view may be a bit extreme but you see the problem I think:

"What I would love is a checkbox on a page that says "Archive" – archived pages wouldn't appear in search results unless explicitly requested as an advanced search parameter.

While I'm at it, I would also love a feature that, for every page, does the following:

• After 60 days, emails the author with a message stating that the page will be automatically archived within 14 days unless the author explicitly re-authorizes the page.
• If no response, archives the page.

These two simple things would, IMO, dramatically improve the usability of the wiki.

I call this the "weekly cleaning out of the refrigerator" feature.

PS - talk to ***. At *** they had a love affair with their wiki until, after about 12 months, it became completely useless due to a collapse in the signal/noise ratio."

Archiving the personal space of a user should remove them from the people directory.