This task is a follow-up of T291500. We need to investigate and document what are the possible options for sampling based on a time frame for a number of edits.

What we know
While it looks like it is possible for QS to sample based on logged-in status and edit count, it gets a bit more fuzzy when looking at a certain amount of edits within a time frame.

Open Questions

• Can we sample based on a time frame for a number of edits?

Yes, but it would need to be implemented:

• New filtering criteria on QuickSurveys
  • PHP backend
    • We would need to add the new configuration criteria and parsing in SurveyFactory
    • Only if there are surveys enabled that require this new number of edits we would calculate it
    • We would set the information in a config variable for the frontend to read and bucket the users (for example with Manual:Hooks/ResourceLoaderGetConfigVars
  • JS frontend
    • We would need to add the reading of this new number of edits, and some code so that this filter would be used when selecting a survey for the user
• The edit counting:
  • We could follow for example the approach taken by core in ActiveUsersPager and query recent changes to count the edits of the user viewing the page
  • Another approach could be querying the revision table, depending on how busy the recent changes table is
  • Depending on the time frame, the queries may be very slow, so we would need to add caching, likely using MediaWikiServices::getInstance()->getMainWANObjectCache(); (| docs) with a sensible TTL, so that the computation is not repeated on each of the user's page views
  • We should also be careful to only query where there is an index since those tables are very big. We can check this kind of thing in doc pages like Manual:Recentchanges_table#Indexes for example.

• If we can, what kind of effort would it be?

It is hard to say, but eyeballing I'd probably say an 8 pointer for the QuickSurveys new criteria feature and an 8 to 13 pointer for the edit counting one.

• What other ways do we have to get information about if a user is active? Other data we could use as a proxy to filter inactive editors from seeing a survey?

There are other options that could be a proxy, like the date of last edit. This combined with the total number of edits (which is readily available) could be an interesting proxy for finding out if a user is active.

This information is available in PHP using MediaWiki\User\UserEditTracker::getLatestEditTimestamp.

We would still need to do the "New filtering criteria on QuickSurveys" part, but that is only about half the work.