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.

Hi Lukas,

Thank you for coding this!

Enhancement requests:

1. Create an option under the Tools menu to manually archive a single page (independent of auto scheduler). This way users can make a judgement call themselves and quickly archive stale pages into the Archive Space:

Tools > Archive Page

2. Put an option in the search box to search the Archive.

Search > Where > Include Archive

3. For the Archived search results that are displayed, apply some UI that clearly indicates that it is an archived page. Maybe use a red background color. See attached screen shot. Else, the combined search results will be confusing.

Thoughts?

Greg

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