Categories marked as __HIDDENCAT__ should not be displayed on wiki change lists unless user has the "display hidden categories" preference turned on.
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Related Changes in Gerrit:
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Change 274081 had a related patch set uploaded (by Addshore):
Hide hiddencat catwatch changes in special changelists
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Change 278263 had a related patch set uploaded (by WMDE-Fisch):
Hide hiddencat catwatch changes in special changelists
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Change 278263 abandoned by Addshore:
Hide hiddencat catwatch changes in special changelists
Reason:
See https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/274081/3
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Change 283213 had a related patch set uploaded (by WMDE-Fisch):
Hide hiddencat catwatch changes in special changelists
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Change 274081 abandoned by Addshore:
Hide hiddencat catwatch changes in special changelists
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Change 283213 merged by jenkins-bot:
Hide hiddencat catwatch changes in special changelists
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two issues here.
- the task itself is a mistake (i.e, "design bug):, IMO. when someone adds a hidden category to their watchlist, they expect to see changes (addition and removal of pages from the cat) regardless of the "show hidden cat" preference: the preference should control whether or not the hidden categories appear in the "categories" box at the bottom of the page, but not block watch items. if dev insists on the current (wrong) behavior, at the very least, these should happen:
- i when a user adds a hidden category to their watchlist, they should be notified that they will not see changes in the category without turning on the non-default "see hidden cat" preferences.
- similarly, when a user turns on the "show changes in cat" filter, they should be notified that they should be warned that they will no see changes to hidden cat.
- when a category is made "hidden", users who are watching it unexpectedly stop getting notified when pages are added and removed
- the implementation itself is buggy: the bug here is that changes to hidden cats are not shown but they are counted. in the "error sate" watching a hidden cat while the preference to see hidden cats is off), if my watchlist is configured to show 100 changes, and someone does something radical which fills or empties such a category with more than 100 pages), the watchlist will show empty, i.e., the hidden cat changes push other changes out of the watchlist (i.e., they are counted), but are not shown. this behavior contradicts the normal/expected filter behavior: changes filtered out of the watchlist are not counted, and the list shows the maximum number of changes which do pass the filter.
@Danny_B :
you authored this task. granted, this was quite a while ago, but you may still remember: what was the rationale?
the task itself seems wrong, and worse yet, surprising - users do not expect this behavior and are puzzled by it. watchlist filtering should be controlled by watchlist filters, not by some obscure user preference (afaik, no other watchlist filtering or any behavior is controlled by some non-watchlist preference).
IMO, this change should be reverted. if it has any value, it should be implemented as follows:
break the "show changes in categories" watchlist filter into 2 separate ones: "show changes in hidden cats" and "show changes in non-hidden cats".
current behavior is surprising, unexpected and undesired.
peace.
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@Kipod, I'm afraid a comment on a task that got resolved 8 years ago will not have much of an effect. Nobody is actively working on this any more. CatWatch got archived. Quite a few of the subscribers here are not even in the same organisation any more.
You would need to create new tickets. Ideally two individual tickets for the two issues you described.
As for the question. I think I understand your perspective. However, the current behavior is not necessarily wrong. The fact that a hidden category is added to a page is meaningless for a user that can't even see the category when looking at the page. Notifying them about something they can't see won't be of much use but confuse them. Still the user might want to get notified whenever the content of the category page itself is edited. This still happens, no matter if the category is hidden or not, as far as I know.
The second issue might be a technical limitation.