Help:Archiving a talk page

On Wikipedia, talk pages are archived when they get too long. This is because it takes a lot of time to find new discussions on long talk pages. Only talk pages are archived. Articles are not. There are two ways to archive a talk page. Both ways are talked about below.

Users do not have to archive their user talk page when it gets long. The other option is to erase all the messages on the talk page. But this is not the best thing to do, as then it is hard for other people to find what they said to the user.