Background
This is the MediaWiki-extensions-CommunityRequests version of T370242: List recent discussions (from all wishes) in one place that was written for the Wishlist intake gadget.
See also T401639 which will ensure discussions happen on one root talk page, rather than a dozen or so language subpages per each individual wish.
Problem
There are a lot of talk pages! We can't easily monitor all of them. It's nice to have a feed where see all recent talk page activity, and be able to respond more quickly to inquiries.
In the old system, we solved this by having the bot add a template to each talk page as wishes were created. With that in place, we have Talk:Community Wishlist/RC which transcludes {{Special:RecentChangesLinked/Template:Community Wishlist/Talk}}, effectively giving us an entire Special:RecentChangesLinked just for Wishlist talk pages. Pretty neat and it works great!
With the extension however, there is no bot, so we need a different solution, ideally with a similar result.
Proposal
Continue to use Template:Community Wishlist/Talk:
It's nice to have a template with standardized language that's on all wishlist talk pages.
- Use PHP hooks to add the template (which will need to be configurable) to talk pages as soon as a wish/FA is created. It would edit as a system user, such as User:Maintenance_script
- Introduce a new parser function, {{#CommunityRequests: wishlist-discussion}} that generates a Special:RecentChangesLinked instance against the aforementioned template.
Alternatives
I briefly looked into perhaps creating our own Special:WishlistDiscussions page that extends SpecialRecentChanges, and adjusts the query accordingly. This might still be the more proper route – I'm not sure – but the proposal to keep using the template is surely the simplest, so I am recommending that.