@TBolliger: This is just an idea I had. Feel free to rewrite or discard.

Great thinking. I'm going to roll this into the Acceptance criteria of T180406: Interaction Timeline V1: Better date picker

In T184147#3875899, @TBolliger wrote:

Great thinking. I'm going to roll this into the Acceptance criteria of T180406: Interaction Timeline V1: Better date picker

Darn I liked it better being separate.

Smaller Tasks are almost always better. :)

@TBolliger With T187406 and T185459, if you don't specify a Start Date, you'll get a single page of results at the beginning of the users' interaction. Because of that, I think we should decline this task in favor of doing the other two.

The reason why I'm thinking this is because with this task, we have to differentiate between when a timeline user intentionally leaves it blank and when they want the default. I think the best way to do this is to set it when the page is loaded, if there is no query in the URL, we'll set the default at that point, if there is a query, we wont.

What do you think @dmaza ?

The more I think about T187406: If no Start Date is specified, use the more recent registration date (or the more recent first edit date) the more I prefer it. It's less arbitrary than 365 days.

if you don't specify a Start Date, you'll get a single page of results at the beginning of the users' interaction

This is not what T187406 say. We'll start showing results after the newer user's registration page. That can still be a few years back.

I think the best way to do this is to set it when the page is loaded, if there is no query in the URL

I'd go with that ^^^ . If there is no query in the URL (meaning no user/date/wiki) then we can default to -1 year (or whatever)

In T184147#3974249, @dmaza wrote:

if you don't specify a Start Date, you'll get a single page of results at the beginning of the users' interaction

This is not what T187406 say. We'll start showing results after the newer user's registration page. That can still be a few years back.

Let's say User:Apples first edit was on February 16th 2006 and User:Bananas first edit was on March 18th 2014. True, you might not care about what happened between 2014 - 2018, but we know for sure that you really don't care about what happened before 2014.