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Add "show new changes starting from" links to Watchlist and Newpages
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Author: lupin.wp

Description:
Special:Watchlist and Special:Newpages would benefit from a "Show new changes
starting from $date" link, like Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newimages.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz4903

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 9:04 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz4903.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

rhododendronbusch wrote:

Some users have 1000 or even more articles in their watchlist. Tracking changes would become more "eyecatching".

  • Bug 10291 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

(In reply to comment #2)

  • Bug 10291 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

A useful suggestion from that bug:

The patch I submitted to bug 10277 makes it possible to add a "changes since
last visit" link to the history of a watched page and the watchlist. This link
would show the combined diffs of all edits since the user's last visit, like
so:

index.php?title=PAGENAME&curid=PAGEID&oldid=LASTSEENREVID&diff=0

LASTSEENREVID in the example above can be determined by finding the revision
with the timestamp given in wl_notificationtimestamp (the timestamp of the
first edit since the last visit) and going one revision back in time.

This shouldn't be extremely hard to implement, but since I know nothing about
skins and all that, I won't be able to do it.

Changing component to "Watchlist"

kceczolx wrote:

*** Bug 10015 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Changing component to "Special pages" because of summary

richardg_uk wrote:

This would be a relatively simple change to [[Special:Watchlist]] that would greatly improve watchlist functionality.

Tracking "visited" pages is of little relevance to users with navigation popups enabled for diff checking.

For most users, the point of the watchlist is to show changes since the watchlist was last checked. But that currently requires the user to remember how long ago the page was last visited (adjusting the "days" parameter accordingly to reflect the number of whole or fractional days).

RecentChanges already allows pages to be restricted to those changed since a specified timestamp ([[Special:RecentChanges?from=20121204150102]]). So there is already a working proof-of-concept.

It should therefore be simple to add the "from" condition to Special:Watchlist.

All that is then needed is to save a Watchlist "from" timestamp in user preferences and update it to the most recent listed timestamp whenever a "reset" button is pressed on the watchlist page.

I think users would be delighted by such a simple but useful change.

sumanah wrote:

Eran and Aaron, are you interested in working on something like this?

I don't have time for this now (too busy with studying).
I think this feature isn't useful as it was when it was first purposed: there is already BOLD (.mw-changeslist-line-watched) changes for pages the user didn't visit in watchlist (and non-bold for visited pages). Users can set all the changes as visited by "mark all pages visited".

Would love to see this feature implemented. With large watchlists people disable the bolding/unbolding for readability purposes. Being able to set a timestamp and only get changes new than that also helps when edits are grouped by page. As of now its manually checking the load timestamp of your watchlist, refreshing and then finding the previous time and reviewing changes since then.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.