It is proposed to add the following template at the top of talk pages of IP addresses:

User:Shalom/Drafts and archives/Template:IPtalk

You can edit or rename the proposed template at Template:IPtalk.

Talk pages of IP addresses have become very long from a multitude of messages (mostly vandalism warnings). A new user who receives his first "new message" on an old IP address will be confused. He may see a large template box stating that "This IP address is licensed to Placeholder School District", a table of contents with sections going back to 2006, and so forth (see this example). It would be kind for us to direct this confused user to look at the bottom of the page.

There are two basic approaches to implementation: by humans or by a bot.

• Human implementation: If you see an IP talk page that is longer than one or two screens, attach this template to the top of the page when you leave a message. If enough people start doing this, the habit will catch on, and eventually most of the IP talk pages will be updated.
• Bot implementation: A bot can be programmed to insert this template at the top of any IP talk page with more than a specified number of bytes (for example: 1,000 bytes). Although this spares human effort, it may have the undesirable effect of causing users to see the "new messages" banner when the template is added. In the human implementation, this template would be added only when there is another message being added anyway.

Please discuss on the talk page.