Watchlists are--like all pages generated by MediaWiki software--static HTML. The display of their contents does not change as the content on the backend changes and new revisions are only viewable once the user refreshes the page or otherwise calls for it. Watchlists and certain other special pages (e.g. Speical:RecentChanges or Special:Contributions/User:FOO) should use some method of dynamically refreshing a la Gmail's inbox using XMLHttpRequest.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
I actually prefer sites that don't auto refresh unless there is a absolute need for it, Apart from RecentChanges most of the special pages generally wouldn't be open long enough in my view to really need it.
Although there might be some tiny usability increases, auto refreshing also introduces a downsides such as when they try to reload when there isn't a available web connection that it will fail and bring up nasty browser error messages in most cases.
(I have lived on filtered net connections where I didn't have web after certain hours, And I like to leave stuff open and come back to it later and not have it errored out due to failed refreshes)
What--if anything--would be lost if the option for dynamic pages was introduced? If users could opt-in or opt-out of XMLhttpRequest-type dynamic pages, that could be a solution and it would also work for non-JavaScript enabled browsers.
I didn't know if this was for "that's-not-a-bug-it's-a-feature"-style "bugs" as well, or just actual "I-can't-use-this"-style actual bugs. Should I take this to mediawiki.org?
(In reply to comment #4)
I didn't know if this was for "that's-not-a-bug-it's-a-feature"-style "bugs" as
well, or just actual "I-can't-use-this"-style actual bugs. Should I take this
to mediawiki.org?
No, enhancement requests are fine here, that's why Antoine changed the severity to "enhancement".
I'm just going to merge this in with bug 5560 and friends.