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Do not group changes by day in enhanced recent changes
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Description

In enhanced recent changes, edits are grouped per day.
For each day, it groups the changes by article.
It would be very helpful if it can group multiple edits across days for each article into single line.

See also: T90482: Make the number of days grouped by enhanced recentchanges configurable

Details

Reference
bz8681

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 9:32 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz8681.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

I also wonder why recent changes keeps this division by days, forcing me to check groups of changes in two different places and in less than 24h (one for yesterday night, one for today morning)

Since the enhanced view is (as far as I know) provided by a piece of JavaScript, I wonder whether they could be fine tuned to group changes by pages, without making any division by days. Or perhaps there is already a gadget that does that?

Bumping this. Having at least a user-modifiable setting to show changes without regard to artificial day boundaries would be useful.

Bumping this again. Every time I am away from WP for a few days, I am reminded of the pointlessness and waste of time involved in having to look at multiple links to see changes for each day. It is especially pointless since the "day" in question is arbitrary, based on the time zone my computer happens to be in.

Please show me all changes to each page I watch, since the last time I viewed each page. It seems like it would actually be easier than the day-by-day list of changes.

I would find RCs without the day groupings very helpful as well. As described in [[Topic on Talk:Edit Review Improvements/New filters for edit review]], I use RC in several private wikis, and I need to review all edits made. I try to do this weekly but life happens. If a page is getting a lot of reviews it clutters up the RC listing. Worse, it is easy to miss the fact that I am not looking at the latest version/diff, and start editing an intermediate version. I ''know'' that I need to not do that, and how to work around it, but it is really easy to miss when you are on a go. And, that's me, it's even harder to get our less technical users to understand this. So, yes, for us at least an option to say "show only latest diff" that would compare it to the last time a logged-in user viewed the page would be great!

I've heard people frustrated by this at events, and I've personally been frustrated by it, too.
There's also a new thread discussing it at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group/TechConf_Input/Challenges#stronger_warnings_when_trying_to_edit_old_version (hence I came looking)

[I think this task might be a child task for T90482: Make the number of days grouped by enhanced recentchanges configurable which IIUC is asking for more complex configuration options.]

Open question (?) How exactly should the raw list be formatted?
Problem: Something needs to be added/tweaked/changed to indicate the day (otherwise it's a mystery). However we also don't want to overwhelm the first column with new "11 August 2018", "10 August 2018", "09 August 2018" items...
I.e. this mix of x number of days would just be confusing, without clear time-patterns. We don't know if it spans 5 days or 30 days.

11 August 2018
▼    07:40   Example (9 changes | history) . . (+778)‎ . . [User‎ (9×)]
      	 	07:40 (cur | prev) . . (-15)‎ . . User (talk | contribs) edit summary
      		12:35 (cur | prev) . . (-10)‎ . . User (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      		06:34 (cur | prev) . . (+9)‎ . . User (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      		23:11 (cur | prev) . . (+2)‎ . . User (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      		05:09 (cur | prev) . . (-2)‎ . . User (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      		07:00 (cur | prev) . . (+136)‎ . . User (talk | contribs)  edit summary
     		05:32 (cur | prev) . . (+623)‎ . . User (talk | contribs)  edit summary

A random selection from RC-enhanced currently looks like:

111 August 2018
2▼ 22:14 Sunlight (2 changes | history) . . (-17)‎ . . [User1‎ (2×)]
3 22:14 (cur | prev) . . (+420)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
4 m 12:03 (cur | prev) . . (-437)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs)
5 21:08 Large Mountain‎ (diff | hist) . . (+88)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) (fix)
6▼N 07:40 Earth‎‎ (9 changes | history) . . (+778)‎ . . [Second user‎ (9×)]
7 07:40 (cur | prev) . . (-15)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
8 07:35 (cur | prev) . . (-10)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
9 07:34 (cur | prev) . . (+9)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
10 07:11 (cur | prev) . . (+2)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
11 07:09 (cur | prev) . . (-2)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
12 07:00 (cur | prev) . . (+136)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
13N 06:32 (cur | prev) . . (+623)‎ . . Second user (talk | contribs) edit summary
14▶ 02:22 Nonsense (2 changes | history) . . (0)‎ . . [Third person; 4443.113.159.193‎]
1510 August 2018
16▼ 21:13 Sunlight (12 changes | history) . . (+406)‎ . . [User1‎ (12×)]
17 21:13 (cur | prev) . . (+483)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
18 m 20:53 (cur | prev) . . (+33)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs)
19 20:46 (cur | prev) . . (0)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
20 20:32 (cur | prev) . . (+412)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
21 m 20:27 (cur | prev) . . (+3)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
22 m 20:15 (cur | prev) . . (0)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs)
23 20:13 (cur | prev) . . (-29)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
24 20:01 (cur | prev) . . (+443)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
25 19:55 (cur | prev) . . (+26)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
26 19:44 (cur | prev) . . (+326)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
27 19:27 (cur | prev) . . (+26)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
28▶ 20:54 Moutain (3 changes | history) . . (+191)‎ . . [User1‎ (3×)]
299 August 2018
30▶ 19:03 River (8 changes | history) . . (+1,835)‎ . . [Anonymouse user (8×)]
318 August 2018
32N 20:20 Large Mountain/doc‎ (diff | hist) . . (+514)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) (edit summary)
33▼ 19:25 Sunlight (5 changes | history) . . (-1,277)‎ . . [Entity‎; User1‎ (4×)]
34 m 19:25 (cur | prev) . . (-900)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs)
35 19:24 (cur | prev) . . (-667)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs)
36 m 19:23 (cur | prev) . . (-764)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs)
37 19:14 (cur | prev) . . (+657)‎ . . Entity (talk | contribs) edit summary
38 18:22 (cur | prev) . . (+397)‎ . . User1 (talk | contribs) edit summary
39▼ 18:31 Example‎‎ (2 changes | history) . . (+296)‎ . . [Person‎ (2×)]
40 18:31 (cur | prev) . . (+156)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs)
41 18:26 (cur | prev) . . (+140)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs)

How can we improve that?

Replying to Quiddity above, assuming that the Watchlist works in basically the same way: To improve it, put a date/time stamp for the most recent change to the left of the page name, and show something like:

11 August 2019 22:14 Sunlight (14 changes | history) (+4,510) [list of editors who made changes]

Basically, show the Watchlist in the same way as now, but without arbitrarily breaking it up into individual days. So if I haven't looked at my watchlist in three days and a page had 7 edits on Tuesday, 10 edits on Wednesday, and 11 edits on Thursday (today), the watchlist should show one line for that page, with a link to the 28 changes that I have not seen yet. I hope that makes sense.

@Jonesey95 Hi :) The thing I was trying to describe (which is quite complicated to put into words!) is that the display becomes vastly more complicated when we have overlapping days AND multiple pages.

E.g. (just to demonstrate a probably-bad idea, for discussion purposes...) One way we could do it is something like this:

▼   Nov 11   07:40   Sunlight (7 changes | history) . . (+778)‎ . . [User‎foo (7×)]
      Nov 11   07:40 (cur | prev) . . (-15)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs) edit summary
      Nov 08   12:35 (cur | prev) . . (-10)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Nov 07   06:34 (cur | prev) . . (+9)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Nov 06   23:11 (cur | prev) . . (+2)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Nov 06   05:09 (cur | prev) . . (-2)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Nov 03   07:00 (cur | prev) . . (+136)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Oct 30   05:32 (cur | prev) . . (+623)‎ . . User‎foo (talk | contribs)  edit summary
▼   Nov 11   05:20   Moutain (5 changes | history) . . (+778)‎ . . [Person (5×)]
      Nov 11   05:20 (cur | prev) . . (-15)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs) edit summary
      Oct 28   12:35 (cur | prev) . . (-10)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Oct 27   06:34 (cur | prev) . . (+9)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Oct 25   23:11 (cur | prev) . . (+2)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs)  edit summary
      Oct 25   05:09 (cur | prev) . . (-2)‎ . . Person (talk | contribs)  edit summary

Hopefully that makes it clearer? Or if you'd prefer to look at actual results, try staring at this set of recent changes limited to a rarely-used namespace which helps highlight the problem.
What exact elements of the page would need to be changed, if we removed the grouping? We'd implicitly be removing all <h4>20 August 2018</h4> and similar from the page entirely. We'd need to add back some clue as to the "day", but how?

We'd need to add back some clue as to the "day", but how?

Well, here I am asking the dumb, naive, pointed questions. ;) Why does the time or day matter in the watchlist? Is that articulated anywhere?

Agree with Izno: what I need from watchlist/RC is a list of things that have changed and an easy way to review them. If I want fine-grained information I can look a the history of the page. For my use case, that would work. Are there actually use cases that need the detail in that part of the user interface?

I'm worried that it will become harder to determine which changes we've already seen (e.g. yesterday, or 3 days ago), if we can't tell which day an edit was made.
E.g. If someone's RC is set to a limit of 100 edits and 3 days (so that they can see changes made during a weekend when checking they check on a Monday) then during the week they'll have to cope with the lines they've already seen from n-2 days ago.

Note this is only a problem for RC, because on Watchlist we can click "mark all changes as seen" to change the formatting of lines. But there's no way to do that for RC.

But IDK. Perhaps this won't be an issue for everyone (or even anyone) who utilizes the proposed option, -- or perhaps they'll learn to change their settings to compensate for any drawbacks, -- or perhaps get better at remembering and mentally filtering-out rows they've already seen. I'm not sure. -- I'm just trying to think about nuances which might lead to any programming-change being imperfect for a majority, and thus necessitating a 2nd major iteration. Ideally we can get it right the first time (and for a wide variety of use-cases), via a bit of initial examination and a very precise description (e.g. drafts/mockups) of the desired outcome. :-)
How about: Ignore me for now, and let's see what the devs have to say about how easy/complicated it is to implement the concept based on just the first few comments.

I'm worried that it will become harder to determine which changes we've already seen (e.g. yesterday, or 3 days ago), if we can't tell which day an edit was made. Note this is only a problem for RC, because on Watchlist we can click "mark all changes as seen" to change the formatting of lines. But there's no way to do that for RC.

I've kind of always wondered why RC and WL share a codebase. :) I agree, that's not a problem on watchlist, which is where I'm coming from--since I don't use RC, it moves too fast on en.wp for that use case to even be interesting unless I'm filtering on some namespace which has edits on the weekly timeframe... which might be none of them? :)

Even though, for those cases, a:visited { different color } on the diff link is usually one of the ways to see if I've checked something, even without the bolding in watchlist.

How about: Ignore me for now

No, don't do that--clearly you're thinking from a different direction.

I don't use RC either. I don't think I've ever even visited that page; the idea of seeing all recent changes is mind-boggling on en.WP. I suspect that the vast majority of active editors (on en.WP) use Watchlist but not RC.

I'm worried that it will become harder to determine which changes we've already seen (e.g. yesterday, or 3 days ago), if we can't tell which day an edit was made.

I think it's the opposite: if I don't know what day an edit was made, now I need to browse multiple sections to find the groups of edits from each day. If they were grouped together, I'd only need to see the updated marker. (There is just one wiki where this is harder, the English Wikipedia, due to local style changes.)

Of course, for various reasons one may still just want to see the edits made on a specific day (other than the last 24 hours), so I expect this grouping to be optional.

SBisson changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Oct 16 2018, 1:06 PM
SBisson changed the subtype of this task from "Feature Request" to "Task".Oct 16 2018, 6:42 PM

(Edit: I'm not sure whether this task covers the watchlist. I'm referring mainly to watchlist below)

E.g. (just to demonstrate a probably-bad idea, for discussion purposes...) One way we could do it is something like this:
[large example snipped as redundant]

I'd be happy with the example Quiddity gave. Having edits to a single page split across different day-sections results in a horrible workflow. I have to rely on new-tab page-history to group the edits for any given page (because there may or may not be future-day edits), and then I need to regularly reload the watchlist to clear out all of the false "new edit" highlighting for edits that I've already reviewed via page-history from older days.

I suspect this would also resolve the need for the somehow-earlier T4877: Obtain a list of edits to watched pages since last visit. (Or should be considered in such context, anyway.)

Tgr renamed this task from Group changes across days in enhanced rc to Do not group changes by day in enhanced recent changes.Tue, Apr 23, 8:15 PM