The idea is to not spend a lot of time (actually, to spend almost no amount of time) examining and analyzing pages to try to sort out valuable content from not-valuable within a page — just put the page in one of those two categories if the content isn't relevant to currently supported Tiki versions or otherwise isn't of interest regarding the purposes of tiki.org.

• If it's difficult to decide between putting a page in "Retired" or in "Archived", perhaps put it in "Retired".
• Pages that have old content, not accurate or helpful to readers regarding currently supported Tiki versions, but have some merit, would go into "Archived".
  • (This is subjective for sure — maybe some patterns/guidelines would become apparently after doing some pages.)
• There would be an alert box in the pagetop module zone, module visibility set to the category so would appear on every Retired or Archived page, that the content is old and maybe of questionable relevance and is being kept for historical purposes.
• With this approach, the situation could gradually be improved if people who are interested spend a little time from time to time.
• Suggested approach: go through tiki-listpages.php sorted by hits to check pages that have gotten relatively more hits but shouldn't be shown now.

This solution can be done with the tools we have now, but assumes that the old/bad pages aren't a drain on resources as they just idling in the database. If they are a resource drain, to the extent that it's a problem we need to fix, then this categorization wouldn't be the solution and something else should be done such as actually removing the pages from the database and storing them somewhere else, but then more resources are needed to do that and it's hard to see how it could be done incrementally the way simple page check and categorization can be.

Until search indexes are refreshed, the categorized pages may still get hits, resulting in a permission-denied error. Should the pages redirect to a similar content page? Maybe this isn't workable because the page may not have a similar page to redirect to that's a satisfying result for the search user. Also, because the page will have the pagetop module alert box explanation, the search user will know the reason for the permission denied. (Maybe the "Permission denied" message could be updated and toned down if it sounds too severe.)

New pages that monitoring needs to look out for aren't created very often, so there isn't a lot to do regarding those; and they're visible in the recent-pages module — it's mostly the old pages that need to be dealt with.