Indentation seems better (at least for now!).

@MusikAnimal Do you know if we will still want to keep this in "Needs Attention"?

@KSiebert @MusikAnimal I'd still really appreciate a look from CommTech - it really should not take an experienced MediaWiki developer more than a couple of hours, and will help tick off another Community Wishlist item.

My apologies for this taking so long… as I recall, it was more or less finished before I started to question some things architecturally, and then I simply ran out of time. I may be able to squeeze this into the Wikimedia Wishathon next week, or at least find someone to adopt it :) Someone asked about this missing feature over at WP:VPT on enwiki a few weeks back, so I feel motivated.

Sorry, I missed this at the time, can you advice someone on the team how to do it, as you are busy.

nb. this missing feature was again brought up on wiktionary recently :-)

From the sound of it, none of us here seem to have strong feelings, so I hope it's alright to stick to essentially:

• if user is watching the page for the first time, defer to the preference
• if user is already watching the page, respect the existing expiry – always

While sure, most wouldn't complain about watching for too long when all they had was "indefinite" before watchlist expiry came about. However, it just feels safe to me at least for this first iteration to refrain from any sort of auto-changes. There's little harm in shipping this as-is, and we can collect feedback and change the logic accordingly (PS18 for reference).

Outstanding issues as of the time of writing:

• Watching via watch star doesn't use preferred expiry
  • This one is pretty tricky. In JS, we can get the preferred expiry but it is returned as a value acceptable only by strtotime(), which doesn't exist in JS. So we need to somehow run the user-preferred expiry through ExpiryDef::normalizeExpiry()
• Action API doesn't respect user preferences
• The patch doesn't add expiry preferences for file uploads, moving pages/files, and deleting pages/files. I'm going to save that for a follow-up patch, if there's demand for it.

I'm working on the above and hope to finish it this week (for MediaWiki CodeJam Dec 2023).

Will the changes cover calls by apps like AutoWikiBrowser, like when I set it to "Use MW preferences" for determining if a page I change is watched?

Also, I realize this isn't likely the best place to request this, but could we get a 3 day (72 hour) option for watches? A week seems too long for watches after casual edits.

In T265716#9404693, @Stevietheman wrote:

Will the changes cover calls by apps like AutoWikiBrowser, like when I set it to "Use MW preferences" for determining if a page I change is watched?

AWB and other clients use the Action API, so unless something other than preferences (default) or watch is passed in the API call, or it passes in an explicit value for watchlistexpiry, it will go by the user preference.

Also, I realize this isn't likely the best place to request this, but could we get a 3 day (72 hour) option for watches? A week seems too long for watches after casual edits.

Seems reasonable, but does need a separate task/discussion. Note your wiki as a community can change the options now by editing MediaWiki:Watchlist-expiry-options (enwiki example).

Update: I was able to fix the watchstar sort of, but that code still needs to be cleaned up.

The bigger issues is adding support into the API. I'd rather not just "hack" it in there, so some refactoring will need to be done first. I'm going to do that as a separate patch.

TL;DR: I won't finish this this week as I had hoped. I very much underestimated the amount of work that there was left. But at any rate, I'm still committed and will be chipping away at this task until it's done! :)

I'm thrilled to see this get was picked up again! Ironically I'm participating in an internal Wikimedia Wishathon right now and I had considered picking this task, since it was a "leftover" from previous Wishathons.

Anyway, please feel free to contribute directly to r789321. I don't care about attribution to me but I'd prefer if @TTO is set as the patch "author" (go to Edit at the top-right and you can change the "Author" on the left). I just want volunteer contributions to remain in the git history :)

I'll happily assist with code review. I should see any activity on my Gerrit dashboard, but please add/ping me if you don't hear from me.

I've now rebased r789321 and all tests passing, so it should be easier to pick up now. Revisiting again, I don't recall what problems I had with it. I think overall it looks fine… but I'm likely forgetting something! Some fresh eyes on it would surely be good.

Anyways, have at it. It would be amazing to finally resolve this – almost exactly 3 years after TTO uploaded PS1 :)

This is ready for another set of reviews!

Change #789321 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] watchlist: Allow configurable default watchlist expiry

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/789321

What are folks' thoughts on whether this is worth an entry in Tech/News (User-notice)? IMO it might be, as a feature enhancement that many editors might be interested in using, but interested about what other people think here :)

Absolutely TechNews-worthy! :)

I have added an entry in the upcoming issue. I have also updated the documentation at Help:Watchlist expiry on mediawiki.org. Please feel free to edit either.

I’ve set the default duration for manual watchlisting to indefinite, and the default duration for edited page watchlisting to one month. When editing a page that was already watchlisted indefinitely, the duration was shortened to one month. The behavior I want is that longer duration is prioritized, not later action’s. (I’ve make the same post on mw:Help talk:Watchlist expiry)

In T265716#10914984, @FlatLanguage wrote:

I’ve set the default duration for manual watchlisting to indefinite, and the default duration for edited page watchlisting to one month. When editing a page that was already watchlisted indefinitely, the duration was shortened to one month. The behavior I want is that longer duration is prioritized, not later action’s. (I’ve make the same post on mw:Help talk:Watchlist expiry)

It occurs by DiscussionTools or mobile edit.